All That Remained

If there was any naiveté on show in Lucidvox’s last album, We Are, it has surely been worn away by now. Finding themselves in self-imposed exile from Putin’s Russia the four female Muscovites of this hard-rocking outfit have delivered a second album that really demands our attention.

Gone is much of the previous bombast, replaced by a sense of melancholy that perhaps only separation, or grief, can bring. The grand scale of the dream-pop-meets-math-rock sound remains, most clearly on show on the album’s opener ‘There Ahead’, so too does the hard-to-follow but impossible-to-ignore jazz drumming of Nadya Samodurova which helps to cement the unsettling atmosphere of the record. The addition of a guesting trumpet, courtesy of Timur Mizinov from scene contemporaries Wooden Whales, adds a new dimension to the sound, emphasising the way that pathos finds a way to punch a hole through the apparent solidity of Galla Gintovt’s ubiquitous cascading guitar.

The move away from insistent sonic overwhelm to a more textured piece of work only seems to strengthen the power of the work. New levels of intrigue cut through, while classic motifs remain. Romantic, ethereal, unsettling… impossible to ignore.