The Long Lost consists of husband-&-wife Alfred (a.k.a. electronic Daedelus) and Laura Darlington. In contrast to the avant-electronics and hip-hop aesthetics of Alfred's music as Daedelus, The Long Lost is a union of two songwriters & producers with a penchant for sad sounds and delicate, electro-acoustic melodies. Psychedelic lullabies for lovers and the lovelorn. As well as Sa-Ra, Laura has also sung for Flying Lotus. A fascinating and utterly individual project, The Long Lost take the subject of love away from the cliches and hackneyed wailing of the mainstream and reconnect it to those strange and uncontrollable emotions we're all so in thrall to.
The Long Lost is the sound of love--on so many levels and in so many ways that it's hard to list them. Imagine Nico had left The Velvet Underground and decided to relocate to California with Caetano Veloso. And imagine that the pair then slipped through a time portal while high on mescalin and came 'round in the late noughties, with the kind of production twists that era would allow. Imagine most of all their beautiful attempt to write and make a new popular music about love was completely sincere, utterly lacking in guile, and full of all the queasy, wonderful, sometimes awful overwhelming emotions.
The opening single, "The Art of Kissing," sets the mood. Acoustic guitar, brushed drums, Laura Darlington on lead vocals, Alfred Darlington (a.k.a. Daedelus) backing up on choruses. It's a pitch-perfect template from which the group expands into edges of psychedelia ("Sibilance"), ribbons of bass clarinet ("Overmuch"), epic '40s film score ("Ballroom Dance Club" and "Siren Song"), bass simplicity ("Colour"), feline fantasy ("Cat Fancy"), music box melancholia ("Finders Keepers"), nursery rhyme romance ("Domestics") and on and on. It's a flexible format, held together by the simplicity and beauty of Laura's voice--uninflected, almost matter-of-fact, but full of a strange kind of magic.
A1 The Art Of Kissing
A2 Amiss
A3 Sibliance
A4 Overmuch
A5 Past Perfect
A6 Ballroom Dance CLub
B1 Siren Song
B2 Colour
Lyrics By - Christina Rossetti
B3 Regrets Only
B4 Cat Fancy
Percussion - Andres Renteria
B5 Woebegone
B6 Finders Keepers
Bassoon - Ben Wendel
B7 Domestics
B8 Awash
