There's an exotic kind of cool about Juanita Stein and her band. Listen carefully to their aching and, of course, howling tunes and you get a distant tinge of blues, a faint twang of soul, and the super-cool fragrance of one of rock's finest enigmas.
Touring with Placebo and The Killers has seen Howling Bells increasingly impinge on the mainstream of late, but if their music is going to sit comfortably there, it'll be on the very cutting edge.
There's a dark shimmer to the Bells' eponymously-titled debut LP that Low Happening encapsulates with an enchanted menace. Screeching guitar lines teetering on the edge of feedback roll into Stein's sensually deadbeat vocals, the Mediterranean ice-lady weaving threads of gorgeous melancholia through like existential silk. Stein is a truly beguiling proposition, passive and dreamy in stage presence but lyrically and vocally as sharp as a fox, and the way she leads her band's best tunes through labyrinthine melodic paths is little less than sublime.
Remixes of Low Happening come in the form of a gloves-in the-air techno-rush from The Presets, a crazy bass-inflected fest from rising mixmasters Dogsend Squash Club, a fine fusion hip hop beats and low-down funk from Little People, and a dark-side concoction of fucked-up percussion and devilish drive from Forward Russia.
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