Cindy - Standard Candle Demos LP

Label: Sloth Mate

Sloth Mate bring to vinyl the impossibly limited cassette of Cindy demos that were recorded to 4-track just before the release of the 1:2 album, and add an extra track for good measure. Some of these songs did then appear in a slightly different form on the recent Why Not Now? LP, but demo or otherwise, our official line on the issue is unequivocal: any Cindy is good Cindy. If you share such a view you'll not be disappointed by these eight flickering transmissions. On their albums, Cindy is a full band, but here it's just singer-songwriter Karina Gill, her inescapably distinct vocal accompanied only by close-mic'd guitar, basement reverb and tape hiss. Given how poetically intimate and confessional Gill's music often is, it feels like a privilege to hear her songs in this nascent form, both spectral and suggestive, yet more than enough just as they are. For the first time, and somewhat unexpectedly, I hear traces of Leonard Cohen in Gill's songwriting—perhaps it's the line 'haven't you heard, no-one can serve two masters?'—which is as grandiose as praise comes I realise, but it's there somewhere in the DNA, a desire to express the ineffable or just some miniature truth. And as desires go, there's few more compelling. Surprising, then, that it's the instrumental opener that stuck with me longest. It's a slip of a song, hardly anything to it, a person in a room with a guitar playing around at the edges of their instinct. Delicate, pretty, alone, no words required. And more evidence of Cindy's economy of beauty.