Sorrow
Rose McDowall: a maid of constant Sorrow.
★★★★
Sleep Now Forever
NIGHT SCHOOL. LP
Dreamy second album from Rose McDowall’s post-Strawberry Switchblade project.
ORIGINALLY RELEASED in 1999, the second album from Sorrow – Rose McDowall, her co-songwriter Robert Lee, and a cohort of players from the blurry borders of the industrial scene – drifted gently ahead of the new millennium’s alt-folk curve. As with McDowall’s more famous band Strawberry Switchblade, there’s a lot of girl-group melancholy on these songs, but it’s become diffuse and abstracted, more like The Shangri-Las hovering round a cradle, or Julia Holter covering Some Velvet Morning. Nigel McKernaghan’s uilleann pipes and whistles, Lawrence Franknel’s cor anglais and John Contreras’s cello add to the ambience of damp brocades and Eve Of St Agnes disturbance, Turn Off The Light and Angel hitting a sweet but disturbing spot between the lullaby and the drone. This reissue might well rescue these songs from cultish obscurity, but it’s a space that Sleep Now Forever inhabits with perfect grace.