The Coral Sea
Kevin Shields
Pask, 2008
2 CD
Catalogue #: PASK 0001
EAN: 0689492080327
UPC: 689492080327
You save: 20%
Personnel: Kevin Shields (guitar); Patti Smith (vocals).
Recording information: Queen Elizabeth Hall, London.
Culled from a live performance at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, this stunning recording meshes Patti Smith's incantatory reading of her long poem THE CORAL SEA with the beautiful guitar abstractions of My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields. The poem, published in book form in 1996, is a moving elegy to the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, a close friend and former lover of Smith's.
Fittingly, Shields's music--a bit more subdued but no less powerful than his work with MBV--undulates and shimmers, suggesting all the majesty and pathos of the hydrosphere, and provides a strong musical undergirding for Smith's raspy spoken-word vocals, which slip into chant and song at odd intervals. Fans of both artists will be pleased, as they bring out the quietly intense best in each other.
