Luminous Frenzy - Three Cliffs Bay

Once upon a time, Frank Hutson was the guitarist in cult early 90s shoegazers The Playthings. After years as a DJ and film score composer, these days he goes by the name Frank Frenzy and now returns with this first single from his latest project Luminous Frenzy’s forthcoming second album. It seems clear where Frank’s heart lies, as ‘Three Cliffs Bay’ uses the same dreamy female vocal over dreamy swirling background as his first band did. The main difference is that that was the early 90s and this is 2007. Instead of just swirling guitars in the background, Luminous Frenzy are purveyors of a highly polished and cinematic ambient electronica.

This can be explained by reasons other than mere modernity. Luminous Frenzy is actually three people these days (expanding to eight for live shows). Along for the ride with Frank are DJ/Vocalist Luminous and DJ/Producer/Programmer Adam Thomas, providing a triumvirate of electronicists to fuel the band’s sound.

“I sit in my back garden at night and just listen. So much ambience, so beautiful. Yet sometimes, underneath, all I can hear is the constant scream of violence all around the world.”

Thus speaks the voice at the end of ‘McEmotion’, originally from the band’s debut album ‘Violence Ambience’ (2005), remixed and included as a b-side to this release. Along with the name of the band and the title of that album, it serves as something of a manifesto for how the trio approaches music making. For though it is apparently a delicate song, ‘Three Cliffs Bay’ is actually filled with an eerie malice. While the dreamlike vocals appear to soothe, they actually tell the tale of the burying of a dead body (possibly a child’s, as indicated by the line: “I hope someday I’ll return to this place to find you grown tall into a man”). The backing for this sinister tale is classic ambient stuff arranged around a hypnotic keyboard riff. Around the middle of the song, though, guitar noise builds to a near crescendo that emphasises the potentially disturbing quality of the lyrics.

As you’d expect from the contributors, ‘Three Cliffs Bay’ sounds very well produced, with Luminous’s vocal perfectly lilting in opposition to the subject matter of the words she sings and the guitar that Frank Frenzy plays. It is certainly interesting and does what it sets out to do, but it misses the arresting contrast of the spoken word in Luminous Frenzy’s previous sample-heavy work (‘Violence Ambience’ was a concept album about the clash between violence and beauty that made use of samples of real people talking about real violent events, including heroin addicts, grieving mothers and more) and after one or two listens quickly loses much of its initial intrigue.

It will be interesting to see whether the band returns to their more successful former approach on the impending album, or whether they’ll retain the more standard sound of ‘Three Cliffs Bay’. For now, though, this is a decent enough bridge.

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First published on rockfeedback.com. See it here.