#✧ || THE PRETTIEST SONGBIRD : AESTHETIC'S.

[13urningstars]

TAGS.

[ally-fr]

Lair Review for Opalwhisker

Yes!! Hit me with that peach/caramel combination!! I will always melt when you show me a dragon with these colors; I love it so much and my own boys Cohen and Gwyath are proof of that! Not only does Shizuka have amazing colors, but I’m a sucker for the lace apparel, especially the sepia variety. She’s a lovely fashionista and I would definitely let her give me fashion tips yes please.

You have so many pretty female SDs and Songbird is no exception. She has so many soft purples and blues, which I love, and the laces return! The apparel she’s dressed in makes her look so elegant combined with her color scheme! I’m a sucker for singers also, which only adds to how much she already has me charmed.

Um hello gorgeous!! Seriously, Kirunali is one of the prettiest imperial gals I think I’ve ever seen, but that may just be because I’m really biased toward abyss/abyss/rasp skink/spin dragons. Her colors? Flawless. Her apparel? Even more flawless. Not to mention I love the candle apparel, so that’s a big bonus! There’s just so much perfection within one dragon. I know she’s a spy, but she’s probably also a thief because she’s stolen my heart <3

Kravitz looks so grim and brooding that I had to review him too. I love seeing obsidian dragons that have a white ghost tert! His apparel and aesthetic is so spooky; I feel like I’d meet him as an apparition in a foggy graveyard, but he’d disappear before I could ask who he was. I also adore feathery wings on imperials! What a good spooky boy.

Thank you for requesting a review! Your lovely ladies melted my soul @opalwhisker

[dustedmagazine]

The Clientele— Music for the Age of Miracles (Merge)

The ordinary turns luminous in this eighth full-length from Alasdair MacLean’s Clientele, as soft layers of guitar, murmuring vocals and lush swathes of strings swaddle rueful melodies. These songs masterfully distill the nothing-much epiphanies of changing seasons and glancing contact with the world into gemlike intervals. They are so gentle that they seem to evaporate into mist even as you listen, and yet they are nowhere near as fragile as they seem; very ordinary imagery of walking home, rubbing elbows with post-work crowds as the light fades are so tenderly rendered that the songs have some of the sweetness of life itself, some of its strangeness and fleeting beauty.

It’s been seven years since the last Clientele record, the Minotaur EP, and in the meantime MacLean has been busy recording two equally lovely (and Clientele-ish but with a shade or two of Latin lilt) albums with his wife Lupe Núñez-Fernández as Amor de Dias and in reissuing old Clientele material. The long layover seems to have occasioned no dramatic changes in his sighing, sun-through-mist aesthetic, which owes a lot to soft-but-complicated 1960s outfits like the Left Banke and Love. If you laid these songs against the re-released material from Suburban Light from the turn of the millennium, you’d notice a bit of ripening, a fuller blown arrangement in strings and other orchestral instruments and a bit of near eastern influence (Anthony Harmer plays santour or Persian dulcimer on many of these tracks), but nothing has shifted very drastically.  

Age of Miracles looks for transcendence in the mundane — and regularly locates it, as for instance in the song “Everything You See Tonight Is Different from Itself,” a lilting reverie punctuated by big emphatic guitar chords and airy arpeggios on, I would guess, that Persian santour. MacLean plumbs the bubbling immanence of natural life, the sense that something more lurks under the regular features of the world in the opening lines, “Nothing here is quite the same, songbirds singing new refrains, palpitations on the train and static in the grass.”  The song, too, lifts off out of its foundations, spiralling out in heady swirls and arabesques touch on the spiritual.

The most arresting song comes late in the album in “Museum of Fog,” in which MacLean speak-sings a narrative over cloudy, hazy, guitar, wordless vocals and bowed cello. He tells of returning to a bar he’d visited illegally at 16, wandering by chance into a back room where a band was playing and then having one of those experiences where time seems to double back on itself.

“The sound their instruments made was almost-human: my beer glass slithered through my fingers as I recognised it as my own 16-year-old laughter, escaping through a toilet window, retreating from a policeman, dragged back through the long track of years which had passed, and re-presented, re-lived in front of the audience. In its disembodied state, it was one of the most purely beautiful things I have ever heard – it briefly brought the past back to life, old hopes and innocence burst into sudden flower.”  

Music for the Age of Miracles is rather beautifully arranged by MacLean and long-time drummer Mark Keen, scored by Chris Taylor with the strings and brass conducted by Anthony Harmer. The sound is very full but soft, with dream-like indefinite edges, sunlit surfaces and moody subterranean currents. It is very easy for this kind of chamber pop to sound ephemeral and silly, but MacLean has a way of imbuing gauzy, hazy clouds of melody with striking intelligence and spiritual relevance. This is one of the prettiest albums of 2017, no small feat in itself, but it feels like a good deal more than that as well.

Jennifer Kelly

[pagesofkenna]

crows and ravens are VERY cool i know but i think if i ever wrote a book that just aggressively used a bird for pure aesthetic it would be a mourning dove or something. some kinda pigeon for sure

[13urningstars]

💞uwu

Moodboard | 💞 REVOLVING HEARTS — our muses' romantic relationship

[13urningstars]

[13urningstars]

Adding onto this. I got cherr guitarist thoughts tonight. I think she should have a cool guitar design, as a treat.

I hope you guys see my vision.