Album Review: Until The Hunter, Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions

Hope Sandoval and Colm O’Ciosoig’s ‘experimental’ venture return for a third outing – their first since 2009’s Through The Devil Softly.

Recorded in two of Dublin’s iconic Martello Towers with sparse folky arrangements, the record continues their often bleak-sounding brand of fatalism.

Sandoval’s voice is eternally yearning and wistful – redolent of wide open spaces and dusty tumbleweed-strewn prairies as the Devil waits patiently at the crossroads for another gullible fool, seeking an easy ticket. She sighs sweetly, words weighted with the promise of a love that wasn’t meant to be and is already doomed. She might be singing about kittens and lollipops, for all I know, but that’s how it sounds to me.

On ‘Into The Trees’, she whispers “I miss you” repeatedly, as lovelorn-banshee-sirens wail over a crusty church organ. The single, ‘Let Me Get There’, a duet recorded with Kurt Vile, comes across as a queasy Mick-Taylor-era Stones outtake and doesn’t really go anywhere. Listening to it I couldn’t help but imagine Nick Cave pushing his way into the vocal booth and bitch-slapping Vile while ejecting him with a well-aimed cuban-heeled boot in the arse – before doing the job properly. I’m getting a bit carried away there. Perhaps!

The overall effect of the album is one of languid ennui, but oh that voice and its unspoken promises.