Virginia Wing - Private Life 4/5
With the eternal, ever streaming cacophony of noise that is the almost un-sailable sea of new music in the 21st century it's more and more difficult to navigate towards music that’s a good fit for your ears. The previous model of music press, tv and record shops filtered a lot of stuff out, and of course left great music out by the margins of the popular but got you to where you needed to be.
It feels like Virginia Wing would be stuck in-between these two worlds. On one hand they have the oddly left field touches that perk the ears up of any music lover and on the other there’s an frosty indifference to commerciality.
The liberal use of saxophone, an instrument that seemed to have been time-locked into the 1980’s, is folded in (“What does that mean ‘Fold in’?”) creating additional jazz angles to the electronic beats presided over by Alice Marida Richard’s cool, detached electro persona.
Pop sensibilities haven’t been completely ignored, they just don’t have the importance that experimentation has, the sheer brevity of the tracks and the record as a whole shows that the short form three minute song is still king here.
There is a cornucopia of contrasting and complementary sounds throughout the album, tracks like ‘Soft Fruit’ makes a landscape of tinkling bells and flutes then jabs at them with a pulsating saxophone before wrapping the whole lot in a vampy bassline. It constructs something that feels light yet solid whilst rendering you slightly dizzy.
It's these juxtapositions of styles and production tricks that makes for a colourful, if not fully realised experience. The Suicide-esque ‘99 North’ enters as a minamlist electro song but suddenly takes a sharp left into acid-tinged playfulness, which then stops for a quick jazz interlude before knitting the whole lot together as a finale.
Where ‘Private Life’ becomes frustrating is the unthawable coldness throughout. Electro music by its very nature is a cold beast but the steely demeanour only lifts briefly on songs like ‘Lucky Coin’ when the spoken word vocals become actual singing and the human connection becomes more apparent and more of this would lift the spirit of the rest of the record.
Virginia Wing seemed to have crystalised their sound into the purest version that they can on this album. The influences are unashamedly writ large on ‘Private Life’ so it’ll be interesting to see where they’ll drive their sound to next.