McKisko
Glorio
9 Track, LP (2009, El Nino El Nino)
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Related: Mckisko.
As McKisko, Helen Franzmann makes solitary music, but even when it’s still, it’s rarely insular or regressive. Begun in Dublin and finished in Brisbane, Glorio for the most part has a brisk sense of engagement. These are sparse, purposeful songs. Opener ‘How We Are’ picks up an echo of the guitar figure from Cat Power’s ‘Cross Bones Style’ and lets you sense the space before spectral overdubs – reverent arias, solemn keys, cello stabs – carry the song away. It helps that Franzmann has a calm, uplifting voice that ranges up and down to hit notes but never holds them too long and twists them until they’re pinioned in the name of self-expression.
‘Silence Slowly’ uses little more than a handful of piano chords to find an architecture where the case can be made for and against a solitary life, while ‘A Difficult Crossing’ steadily layers martial percussion, urgent keys, shallow handclaps and snatches of melodica one atop the other – the effect is akin to that of a lo-fi Michael Nyman arrangement. Consider the two aforementioned songs as border points, with the rest of Glorio inhabiting the ground in between. The final minutes fade out into nocturnal introspection, but much of the record exists in the mission set by the closing refrain of ‘A Difficult Crossing’: “Glory at the edge of dream.”
by Craig Mathieson
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