Projekt sent over a press clipping of a La Jornada newspaper review of our recent concert in Mexico City. Not sure how great this translation is, but here goes:
Recital with throat and guitar of the angelic duo
“That of Love Spirals Downwards, naked music in the Chopo”
by Pablo Espinosa
With the tenderness of a lullaby, the tenderness of a hologram, the smoothness of a wallflower, the voice of Suzanne Perry lived in the Poplar Museum on Thursday night in a beautiful appeasement, a soliloquy in a waning room, a sedative applied to the shoulder, the neck and the soles of the feet of the soul.
The rain could be heard in Suzanne Perry’s voice. The rains painted by Vicente Rojo, the rains that Saint John Perse sings, the waters of March announced like this.
Suzanne Perry and Ryan Lum are part of the duo Love Spirals Downwards. Not even in the United States had they played in such a big and beautiful place, the Californian Angelina talked funny in front of the microphone and a multitude of relieved guys who filled the thing.
Before the Mexican debut of this great duo, a long wait and the presence on stage of an opener group with Dante’s name: La Divina Comedia, with all the enthusiasm of those amateur groups that start making covers and salads and mixtures of several of the albums they get, although they put their own lyrics and even some of Violeta Parra.
At last on stage, Love Spirals Downwards appears without more than her throat and his guitar: naked music.
In Los Angeles the sequencers and synthesizers remained, the small paraphernalia with which Ryan Lum knows how to complete the musicality of Perry’s vocals, and therefore it is half of Love Spirals Downwards’ sounds: Perry’s voice only, because the enabled sonorization does not allow the full body drawing of the harmonies that Lum traces and instead of what you can hear, it barely seems that they only know two or three chords, when something else is happening on stage.
However, the experiment was finally lucky: this circumstantial unplugged performance allowed a hypo-exalted intimacy; the intense kids –attired in black– left the concert satisfied and with the curtains of their eyelids at half mast, appeased, down in good vibes, with the Spirals Down but the soul levitating over the meandering and low tides, sailing in the calm waves, prosperous sea, calm journey, of the voice of Suzanne Perry that with her unusual capacity for concentration suddenly passed, enabled by Lum’s guitar harmonies, from being a nice gringuita joking with the band to a unique singer among that constellation of “darkie” vocalists (although the classification is as arbitrary as it is insufficient) that permeate her singing on the side of the archangelic girls, from the elongated vowels to ecstasy, from the soft melodic twists that in Suzanne’s voice is a magnificent prosody with the musical craftsmanship of Ryan Lum.
Among so much city violence, institutionalized, Suzanne Perry’s voice was a balm on the city of Mexico.
