Returning with their first release since 2013’s Seasons of Your Day (itself coming 17 years after the band’s previous album Among My Swan), Still finds Mazzy Star, the Californian dream pop/neo-psychedelic trendsetters, treading well-worn avenues. And no longer just their own; the duo of vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Hope Sandoval and guitarist/multi-instrumentalist David Roback has helped to popularise a sub-genre of the alternative music mainstream that is still being successfully mined (read: oft-mimicked) to this day. Any new release from these genre pioneers is to be celebrated, and much of the music on this four track EP is gloriously warm, but a substantial portion of it is ever so familiar; there’s little new about which to get excited here.
Despite the lack of a full-length or EP release, it has been an eventful few years for the band. In 2016, Sandoval delivered the album Until the Hunter, the third with her band Hope Sandoval and The Warm Inventions (an enterprise with My Bloody Valentine founding member Colm Ó Cíosóig), while in 2017 the group dealt with the death of long-time studio drummer Keith Mitchell. For fans however, after that 17 year wait between albums, these five seem like a breeze.
‘Quiet, the Winter Harbour’ launches the EP. Acoustic piano rather than guitar leads the line in what is a notable stylistic shift for a Mazzy Star opener. The track’s structure has a deliberateness that works. Elements are carefully layered over the course of the four minute piece; gentle, unimposing piano, Sandoval’s syrupy vocals, muted percussion, and finally layers of guitar. It’s an awfully simple formula, and despite the calculation, the track builds organically, exhibiting real beauty. Non-quantised instrumental performances and a sound that smacks of “recorded live in the studio without overdubs” equip the song with real presence. It’s a promising opening.
From its very beginning, ‘That Way Again’ is distinctly set from the Mazzy Star mould; it could have been lifted from any of the band’s ’90s era LPs. Unsurprising, given that it’s not a newly written piece – the song was played live as long ago as 1994. Everything from the instrumental to the track’s constituents, from the production to the effect pedal used on the lead guitar, sounds like vintage Mazzy Star. It’s lovely, and delicate, and truly elegant. Over-familiarity notwithstanding, here’s proof that the lightning caught in this bottle back in 1989 is still striking.
The EP’s compact title track is spiky and textural. Mixing things up yet again, the grimy strummed acoustic guitar creates a delicious friction with the dusty vocal and plaintive violin, arco and pizzicato in equal measure. Eschewing a traditional structure, the track comes and goes in a matter of two too-short minutes.
Rounding out the EP is a re-recorded version of the title track and closing number from the band’s second album, So Tonight That I Might See. Dubbed the ‘Ascension Version’, an unrelenting organ played throughout the track replaces the original’s guitar, vocal snippets flicker in and out across the stereo spectrum and a hesitant percussive performance tries to keep things together. Ultimately, it all turns into a Velvet Underground-like improvised jam – a post-punk, no-wave, post-rock synthesis that would be a fascinating evolution of sound for the band, had so much of what constitutes the track not been a re-working of a 25 year old song.
The EP is tight, efficient (Sandoval is as lyrically economical as ever) and full of disparate moods. It works almost as a primer for those new to the church of Mazzy Star. And for that reason, being alternately too brief, but at the same time having too broad a reach while treading stylistic waters, the EP may not quite work for fans. Like its predecessor in the band’s discography, Still has its shortfalls; on this occasion a curious, slightly underwhelming mixture of the very old and the briefest flirtation with something approaching unfamiliar.
Reviewer : Stephen Benko-Nehme