tiny vipersTiny Vipers is Jesy Fortino, mostly accompanying herself on acoustic guitar. Her plaintive vocals and minimal finger picking gently wash across the ears. Fortino's vocal delivery and choice of accompaniment play with ideas of folk music, but this record relies a great deal on recording studio technique. The studio tinkering is most obvious in tracks like 'Twilight Property' and 'Young God', which combine drones along with what sounds like loops and piano. Careful listening reveals that the edges of notes have been meticulously smudged throughout all of the tracks. Most of the guitar parts are cloaked in enough reverb to make a dubstep producer jealous, while Fortino's vocals are treated with a variety of different effects throughout the disc. The spacious, but focused, sound palette along with Fortino's unhurried playing combine to make small musical events seem truly momentous. When Fortino whistles a few notes on 'Tiger Mountain' towards the end of the album the contrast in musical colour is unsettling. As the music unfolds it becomes apparent that this instrumental restraint is calculated to heighten the drama of Fortino's vocal performance. Life on Earth is, quietly, a Wuthering Heights of an album, exploring extremes of human emotion and behaviour. Fortino is a remarkable singer, frequently employing a Celtic lilt and recalling at different moments singers as diverse as Neil Young and Kirsten Hersh. She seems to be interested in channelling her songs and various voices rather than expressing personal feelings. Her lyrics are undefined and melancholy, but individual lines occasionally emerge with startling clarity. Fortino's commitment to each performance and understated passion suggests that in live performance she must be electrifying. This whole work is haunted with a sense of loss and death. In its own way this music is as stark, uncompromising and bleak as Burial or Burzum. --nick ilott.
:: Tiny Vipers/Life on Earth - Sub Pop/Cargo.
