Slow Signal Fade, The
Steady
The Slow Signal Fade has layered many influences into the groups guitar-soaked music, including but not limited to the Cranberries, Cat Power, British shoegazer and space-rock. The Los Angeles bands debut full-length is a multi-tiered, slow burn that incessantly swells to a fiery crescendo, propelled by gauzy guitars and Sri Lankan born singer Marguerite Olivelles vaporous voice - the best thing in alternative music since Hope Sandoval. The extensive wall of sound arcs with great effect: delayed guitars ebb and rise, songs fluctuate from open-spaced ambiance (frail piano-acoustic guitar ballad "Counterpunch") to epic structures. The nearly 10-minute "At Least Were Dancing" moves from a My Bloody Valentine stratagem to an expansive drone Jimmy Page would appreciate. Unearthly "Thats a Long Way Down" is a hallucinatory, wired journey as distinctively solar-inflected as anything Spiritualized ever concocted. Steady was easily one of the finer local-LA releases of 2006, and an album that sounded better the more often and louder it was played.