You can imagine the storyline: Honey Owens a.k.a. Valet wanders into the local library with the harmless and expected goal of checking out a few books, when her proximity to the rows of public computers causes them all to spontaneously combust! A librarian runs over and looks, hands on hips, at Owens with undeniable consternation, and Owens herself decides, at that moment, to live a life thoroughly “off the grid,” where the only damage she’ll be doing will be to the leaves under her feet and to the fauna she might have to catch in order to survive. It’s tough having a self-admitted supernatural resistance to technology.
And so the title of Valet’s first album in seven years makes sense if the above tale was anything close to true, but in reality, her intermission was characterized by civilized things with Rafael Fauria — a band, The Miracles Club, and a child (whose name I don’t know). Nature maintains Fauria’s musical presence and joining the duo for something resembling psychedelia was multi-instrumentalist Mark Burden. You get the impression going back to Naked Acid that Valet wasn’t especially devoted to a particular style, but things still sound plenty bluesy to me.
Out May 25 on Kranky, btw. Here’s a track:
Nature tracklisting:
01. Sunday
02. Nature
03. Signs
04. Lion
05. Nowhere
06. Clouds
07. Transformation
08. Child
• Kranky: http://www.kranky.net