Azure Ray – Burn And Shiver

The voices of the two women who are Azure Ray suggest bedtime: whispery, comforting, soft and downy. The music all around them suggests machines: always churning, remorselessly in motion. Combined, they are lullabies for insomniacs.

Essentially a side project for Orenda Fink and Maria Taylor of Athens, Georgia, pop-rock band Little Red Rocket, Azure Ray outshines their main gig. The music on Burn And Shiver emanates from the subconscious, the spaces between thoughts and actions. It comes from everywhere and nowhere.

Burn And Shiver parallels the childlike serenity and dreamlike flow of Bjork’s Vespertine, but it forecloses on the high, dramatic release Bjork offers. The compressed intensity of Fink and Taylor’s vocal performances never soars into structured refrains: the sad, longing tension gathers momentum from constancy.

As produced and arranged by former Archers of Loaf frontman Eric Bachmann, loops of electronic sound and tight packets of accompanying instruments — violin, cello, trombone — fan the embers Azure Ray huddles over. The horn crying across the Ennio Morricone evocation of “While I’m Still Young” and the music box chiming louder than every other eerie thing in “The New Year” turn drowsy breathing into the gasps of sudden revelations. Magnificently hushed and momentously soft, Burn And Shiver does right by its title.