Evi Vine – Give Your Heart to the Hawks

The first track from Evi Vine’s upcoming release is the minimalistic ‘Porcelain’ which followed by ‘Love is Gone’ could quite easily be one of the same song, neither have much in the way of a backing track and both focus on the slow and quiet vocals which continue throughout the album.

I can only imagine Evi Vine is going for the dark haunting approach by the likes of the wonderfully talented Chelsea Wolfe, but first impressions here is that she falls somewhat short – there’s nothing to immediately grab your attention and by the time there’s any more intriguing sounds or the spoken word vocals are on offer, it’s still not quite enough to keep you interested.

There are times when I really love the minimal approach, where you just drift off as you listen and I appreciate Evi Vine is trying to do exactly that, but even with producer Richard Formby having previously worked with Spacemen 3 and Mogwai (who surely perfected the quiet/loud formula) Give Your Heart to the Hawks is all rather non-eventful and uninspiring.

Listening to ‘My Hands Are Tied’ for example is hard work, don’t get me wrong Vine herself does have a voice well suited to this sort of music, it’s just the album doesn’t really go anywhere; when the drums kick in on certain tracks they don’t step it up a gear and when there’s the additional samples introduced it just sounds as though someone got bored in the studio and turned the television on before realising there was a recording session in place.

With Richard Formby also having produced Wild Beasts second album Two Dancers featuring the rather special ‘Hooting and Howling’ I had high hopes for this release, but as the last two tracks in ‘Starlight’ and ‘I’m not Here’ do exactly the same as it’s openers, there’s no big crescendo to bring the album to a close and having finished listening to Give Your Heart to the Hawks I couldn’t help but think it’s unfortunately forty five minutes that my ears won’t ever get back.