Review: Secret Flight – S/T

These songs strive to be airborne. The voice hits high vowels and holds them, like a balloon straining on the string, defying descent for as long as it can. Synthesisers swirl in arpeggiations, with low frequencies absent for long passages and leaving the melodies suspended in query, in hope, in halted time. Inevitably arrives the comedown: hard electro-beats come to claim the vapours of “A Prism”, while the melody on “The Wound” descends reluctantly, in painful reconciliation with the vocal refrain of “the wound never closes”. Beautifully enacted through the tonalities of classical music and the most earnest edge of pop balladry, the album’s dynamic is on the vertical axis: upward into flights of optimism and romance, downward into crushing disappointment. Rising, falling, rising again. “You were hoping for it,” she sings on the album’s closer, before following up with: “you were broken by it”. The whole track then gives way to a beat resembling waves crashing against a harbour wall, encapsulating the album’s dichotomy of elegance and guttural realisation. Secret Flight cites various references in the album’s accompanying text, including classical composers such as Bach, Gorecki and Purcell, but also Julee Cruise, with which this record shares an air of brittle fantasy. The synthesisers here arrive in sweeps and sparkles, pretty but uncanny, lush to the point of surreal, like a dazzling blanket thrown haphazardly over a bundle of unease. It's a dream in which one knows that they're dreaming, the beauty undercut by the knowledge that the cold sobriety of the morning is coming.