(from CWSY#5, March '01) / home / reviews index

Union Wireless - 'All Her Life' (Elefant)
Second album from a 'space-folk' collective on Barcelona's Elefant label, charting 'All Her Life' - or just a whole day?

It starts with a hum. It goes on with a hum alone for about 2 minutes into the first song. You can tell this isn't yer average 'alternative' band but, despite the experimentation in their drone, that doesn't make Union Wireless tedious or inaccessible. When from out of the Hum the drums beat rumbustiously strong on this first track 'All Her Life', and the woodwind comes in, then the strings so deep in the mix they're easily missed, it's like waking up to all the activity of spring morning.

'Afterglow', again, builds up gradually, sucking percussion, rippling piano and questioning vocals heard amongst mysterious squeaks and whirrs. 'A Carnival' has a galloping tune similar to 'Mogwai Fear Satan' and feels very reminiscent of Nick Drake; perhaps the production of 'Bryter Later' applied to a Krautrock album. Different instrumentation and odd rhythms waft in and out of an open window, before 'The Best Time of the Day' comes pounding on with salsa-ish rhythms and random glockenspiel.

'She is Asleep' is a mid-afternoon nap, clarinets swooning and scratched guitars stumbling round a dream world. 'Walking or Running' also has an apt title, upping the pace with tribal drums and wk-chk guitars. The vocals are from the school of Ashcroft and Jason Pierce, lyrics searching and painfully honest like the Delgados.

'Just One Minute' is longer than that, slow and reflective at the end of the day, while 'Smoke and Deception' gets on a Joy Division groove over shaky beats, complete with bathroom-echoed cymbals a la Hannett. Well, it sounds like that. 'Circulation' ends the day, the album, 'All Her Life', with a funereal keyboard playing a shanty tune, going into a dense and mournful stringscape and uncertain like into the darkness of night…But taken as part of a whole, it's an affirmation that music can be 'out-there' while hitting you in there, that songs can still exist when all boundaries of the 'expected' have been broken down. It's gorgeous!