- What ghastly advent is this? What light emerges yonder, from the sucking fog? Seven years ago we bid the navigators of the feverish murk farewell; we never expected them to return. Have they come back … changed? It’s hard not to revel in the simmering unease of Fabulous Diamonds, who have only just started to glitter again, like faerie lights over the swampland. The booming, cavernous reverb offers an unfocused vision of Nina Venerosa’s sonorous, chanting voice, her slow, tribal drumming and Jarrod Zlatic’s braying synths and haunted trumpet refrains: all of the elements slowly unwind like a gently thrumming generator of psychic unease.
Every one of the duo’s krautish records have spiralled outwards like another possible soundtrack for The Wicker Man. Yet, for all the slow, grinding repetition, each one presented a slightly different sound, a new facet of The Fabulous Diamonds, if you will. It travelled from their earliest soup of post-punk influences on their first, self-titled album, to the motorik power and atavistic folk rituals of Fabulous Diamonds II and then the cloying, suffocating atmosphere of the perversely titled Commercial Music, all the way back in 2012.
In the seven year interim if there hadn’t been some change, that’d be the more surprising. Change is indeed the constant and it heralds a new, more mature and nuanced perspective on The Diamonds. That is, the ingredients are quite similar, but the results are remarkably different. Space becomes a significant feature: the music has always been slow, but inexorable - filling all the available area with endlessly looping rhythm. Plain Songs, by contrast, is much more playful, prepared to let things rise, fall and leap about in volume and tempo. Just look at opener Wheel Of Fortune, repeatedly surging out of silence and lapsing back into it. Krautrock is still an element, but it feels more like just one that Fabulous Diamonds choose to work with, rather than the whole game.
I’ve never been wholly sure what keys Zlatic employs, but they often sounded like a fusty old organ or even a grinding hurdy-gurdy, really amping the folky, ritual qualities of the music. That’s fallen by the wayside too. Instead, much of the new album sounds like the proto-synthwave of John Carpenter or even the sinister cheese of Angelo Badalamenti and, as a result, more like soundtrack music than ever before.
Is this record an accompaniment for some non-existent film noir or horror slasher? Does it feel the lack of an actual film to go with it? I don't think so and part of that’s because Nina Venerosa’s vocals are much higher in the mix, pushed to the centre of the stage, overpowering synth and trumpet with ease. It really allows you to focus on her repetitive lyrical fragments and ponder what something like “People who want it / Eat their way through / Gingerbread house” could possibly mean.
I’ve actually had arguments with people about whether Fabulous Diamonds are a lofi band. Whether their own inclinations were towards lofi and DIY or not, the indisputably high quality work of Mikey Young behind the boards presented them that way on their previous records: a stylistic conceit that fitted perfectly with the ascendancy of the nofi sound of labels like Woodsist. Not any more! A new decade and a new producer, Sam Karmel, has put the various parts of the Fabulous Diamonds sound in their hifi places. Don’t get me wrong - there’s still some distinctly lofi twinges -shredded, peaking sounds from the recording process- but the mixing is high fidelity all the way. The resultant concoction of those old DIY tendencies and newer, slicker ones may take a while to click, but the whole will slowly creep into place.
It’s strange, the more I listen to Plain Songs, the more unnerved I feel. Like I arrived there at midday and it was fine. Now the sun’s going down and each growing shadow hides something ominous. Nina Venerosa’s repetitive vocal snatches just sounded like someone’s record player left unattended, skipping “Problems are...problems are...problems are… / Flowers and fade...flowers and fade...flowers and fade.” Now they seem like an important message, pointing to some looming horror that I can’t quite comprehend. The claustrophobia can be intense.
Very much like the leery, outsider crooning of Scott Walker, this record takes some decidedly unlikely -even risibly simple- elements and makes something inescapably unnerving. I said before that Plain Songs felt like a soundtrack without a horror movie. Perhaps it’s more like a soundtrack that slowly, almost imperceptibly makes its own horror movie, leaking out of the seams of the music.
Imagine being trapped in that film, in an early scene where you run into a bit-part character, a local going unassumingly about their work. You might quiz them about the strange haunting strains, emenating out of the background. They would look at you with a neutral expression and say “why, sir, these are just songs, plain songs.”
- Chris Cobcroft.