Can I just really quickly mention that even though I (think that I) am breaking the rules by reviewing this tape on December 21st, 2014 for Cerberus, that I could seriously give two shits? The Soundcloud stream you can check out below the writing I’m about to write was uploaded to the world wide web in April of 2013. Yikes. To be fair to myself (and to you guys I believe, who now have gotten the opportunity to read this little blurb about it, thus hopefully hipping a select few to its charms and beauties, which are plentiful), Kiss You So Many Times You Can’t Count My Love only showed up in my mailbox a short couple of weeks ago with a bunch of other goodies from Sanity Muffin. Therefore, I think reviewing this little beauty is totally fair game, and in fact kind of necessary. To be perfectly frank, I just have to write something about this — one of the prettiest and overall best tapes I’ve gotten within the last calendar year. Phipps pt is music written, played and sung by a woman named Lovage Sharrock who’s got a voice that bounces off the surface of your eardrums like light from an abalone shell. Beneath lilting, skeletal guitar ballads, all shrouded in ghostly reverberant overtones and subtle synthesized backdrops, Sharrock lets patient melodies float out over extended passages of sustained verse. You’ll wanna say “Grouper” right away, given Phipps pt’s similarly cavernous stereo settings and hushed songwriting aesthetic, and I won’t blame you. But know this: I have already listened to this tape multiples of dozens of more times than I did Ruins, and I think there are some solid, tangible reasons why, aside from the fact that it’s in my review pile, that I love that it’s something new and different in the field of acoustical spirit-summonings, and even beyond the show-stopping cover of Robert Wyatt’s “Sea Song” smack-dab in the middle of the album. Lovage has an incredibly direct whisper, less distant than you might think; almost uncomfortably close without sacrificing its inviting, alluring tone, letting us all in on the secrets instead of hiding them back in a fog. The effects are there for sure, but always secondary and subservient to the tasks at hand: relating a story and doing so in beautiful song. She tells me things I like hearing, but more importantly, they’re things that I need to be hearing. “What are you searching for / what are you waiting for” she pulls me in closer and closer… “and when you find that find, will you then be satisfied? / I want you to be gratified.” Well, let me tell you miss Lovage Sharrock. I sure as shit have, and I sure as shit am.
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