DREAM MAGAZINE
(USA)
DECEMBER 2001

Piano Magic
Artists Rifles
(Rocket Girl)

George Parsons
www.dreamgeo.com

There's an almost Kubrick cool to Artists' Rifles, emotion at a distance, played out in slow meticulously unflinching detail. Soundtrack to a new world of twilit mourning. Music box hypnotic, haunting dreamlike parades of shadow and light, but mostly shadow. Still able to get a maximum effect from a minimal amount of notes, and somehow sounding like a lost 80's band (without the scary production) channeling music from a Victorian drawing room. Or on the wordless Century Schoolbook; like the soundtrack to some Dario Argento film during a sequence where a group of schoolgirls all wearing red walking through the woods, are slowly followed by a wolf or worse. Password pays homage to Vini Reilly's Durutti Column, though Vini was rarely this bleak. This time around mainmain Glen Johnson handles the majority of the vocals, though Caroline Potter does an wonderful job on the swaying dreamy A Return to the Sea, and dueting on the haunting You & John Are Birds, or weaving her wordless vocals in the backgrounds of a few others, it's more clearly Glen's show; his frail yet evocative voice is the perfect instrument to express this kind of beautiful desolation.