Spires That in the Sunset Rise
Four Winds the Walker

Autoharp, harmonium, melodica, mbira, spike fiddle, violin, harp, and guitar.

According to the Spires That In The Sunset Rise, this is just a part of the instruments they enjoy strumming in their albums.

Instead of relying on the typical "guitar bass drums" formula, the Spires choose to fill their tracks with layer upon layer of curious instruments from all over, but let's go in order. Before talking about the music, let's spend a few words on their bio.

The STITSR are four girls (now three, since Tracy Peterson is no longer part of the band) hooked on Raincoats and Cumus and come from Chicago. Their names are Kathleen Baird, Georgia Vallas, and Taralie Peterson. In 2001 they picked up their instruments, and their first untitled album was released in 2003. Tracy Peterson, Taralie's sister, joined the group in 2005 and stayed until the release of This Is Fire, the successor to Four Winds The Walker. Also in 2005, Taralie and Kathleen ventured into solo projects and in May 2008, Cursed The Traced Bird was released, seven long dark, psychedelic, and intimate tracks, undoubtedly their most mature and graceful album.

But now let's focus on this Four Winds The Walker, which in my opinion best represents their enigmatic, neurotic, and extremely visionary music.

Four Winds is another world and another era, it is the sacred and the occult. The music of the witches.

The four girls are often compared to "witches," and although they do not seem to particularly like the term, the association is quite fitting.

The tracks on the album are 14 exquisitely moody and disturbing Weird Folk sketches. There is little to question about their alleged talent. Our little witches know their stuff.

Evocative medieval landscapes, alienating atmospheres, hypnotic brushstrokes of Free Folk, spasmodic obsessive fits of anger, epileptic and evocative Freak drafts. Their spell works wonderfully!

Always in a permanent balance between the dark/psychedelic spectrum of Current 93 and Sun City Girls, the more canonical songwriting and Folk à la Vashti Bunyan and the psychotic children's rhymes, the Spires smoothly transition from the pagan and sabbatic Ong Song and Imaginary Skin to the vintage and melancholic melodies of the nostalgic ballad Little For A Lot and the dark Sort Sands and No Matter, all three sung by a regal Kathleen Baird, with an austere and deep voice.

If Baird is the Nico of the situation, the other three are the worthy heirs of Lydia Lunch's obsessive quirks, mischievous and revengeful sprites with shrill, crooked, and hostile voices that lend hysterical and crumpled tracks like Sheye, Serum, or Born In A Room the right amount of eclecticism thanks to their warbles and bewildered howls.

Moreover, the hodgepodge of instruments they are accustomed to using helps make their pieces even more intriguing and claustrophobic (This Ain't For Mama, Wide Awake).

An album with a deeply acidic and drained sound, eerie and totally captivating in its imperfection, dissonance, and drunkenness.

Well, we are left with nothing but to get drunk, indeed, on these four fanatical free spirits and their hallucinatory and hallucinating music and allow ourselves to be estranged by what they can conjure up from the strings of their old half-broken vintage instruments and their degenerate vocals.