Album Review: The Mistys- Redemption Forest


Falling somewhere in the darkness between Portishead and Bjork, Redemption Forest, the debut LP from The Mistys, is a tour de force, combining innocent sounding wonder and creeping electronic menace. The result is a strange juxtaposition that’s both inaccessible and welcoming all within the same song.

Hailing from across the pond, The Mistys are a duo comprised of vocalist Beth Roberts, and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Hargreaves of ambient-popsters The Boats, and the jaw dropping experimental project Tape Loop Orchestra. This heavy electronic-leaning sound is a bit of a departure for Hargreaves, but the skittering, oppressive synths and drum beats show that even in a new musical landscape, he is most proficient. Roberts’s vocals can, at times, be off-putting, but I'm fairly confident that was the whole point. The combination of the two elements, simply put, is stunning, and the duo has created a record that demands your full attention.


Straddling the line of club-ready jams (“Strumm,”) claustrophobic terror (“Dental Records,”) and post -Yeezus oppressive electro scuzz (“Moy,”) Redemption Forest is a torrent of emotion, and it’s the kind of dark electronic record that we need right now. While countless other somewhat similar artists are paying homage to the R&B and pop sounds of the 1990s and modernizing them for 2013, The Mistys are making fearless music that could, in fact, make you afraid. By using the early days of trip-hop as a point of departure, the duo is neither modernizing nor deriving from it.

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