Meanjin/Brisbane’s Cloud Tangle, the nom de plume of the glorious Amber Ramsay, is releasing her third album ‘Dreaming Again’ this week, and you can get an early listen of this exquisite album premiering here thanks to the dynamic duo of 4000 Records and False Peak Records.
Cloud Tangle creates sonic architecture that lives up to the name – delicate cotton wool balls that float in a glacial world: shimmering and ethereal. In fact the latter word seems to have been created with Ramsay’s music in mind. As I’ve written before, there is something Antarctic and distant about Ramsay’s vocals, antithetically warmed by the rich luscious instrumentation that bubbles underneath. It is mesmerising stuff that draws in all the best of Cocteau Twins and The Cure.
The album as a whole is held together by a gossamer thread of yearning – a fantastic world of sleep and dreams, longing, awakening and hope.
Opening title track sets the scene. There is a long haunting introduction with mesmerising synths that seem to massage the ears drawing you into its spider web, before Ramsay’s vocal float across the speakers, repetitive, bewitching and cool. it is like some immersive tangible dreamscape that enchants. ‘Falling Star has a nursery rhyme simplicity to the melodies that mimic the synths before giving away to light percussion.
In ‘To Wake, To Keep’, Ramsay’s vocals never sound more delectable – with a breathless emotion that recalls the late great Dusty Springfield, imbued with a sense of yearning and melancholy. Ramsay says of the track:
We saw a ghost at the end of our street” [‘To Wake, To Keep’] is based on a real childhood memory of seeing a ghost on the street that looked like a large glowing wolf. In hindsight it was probably just a dog but in the moment I believed it to be something magical and it opened my mind up to things being more than they seem.
‘Godlike Masquerade’ is an ethereal gentle ripple of aquatic sounds gilded by Ramsay’s ghostly velvet vocals: dreamy and shimmering in the ether. There are shades of later period Radiohead: cyclical, hypnotic.
Ramsay says of the accompanying video:
I was spending a day resting in Vienna during my solo travels when it started snowing unexpectedly and I rushed out the door to wander through the gardens I had been frequenting nearby and enjoy the snow falling from the sky. I ran back and grabbed my camera and shot the music video on my wander through the snow. Having grown up in subtropical QLD, snow feels really novel and magical, which seemed to match the otherworldliness of the music. The train scene is both symbolic to the lyrics and a throwback to the early live visuals of black and white trains and film footage. I captured the final shot on a train through northern Italy.
‘Balconie Fantasie’ is fringed with haunting backing vocals and a hypnotic delivery, languid and louche. There is something Lynchian in the sound. The track apparently came from the surreal experience for Ramsay of living alone during the initial stage of the global pandemic, a time where there were also severe cases of bushfires in Australia, rendering a hazy mood and imagery for the song.
‘Hands Reach’ and ‘Kairos’ appear to float in a somnambulistic state – in some other alien world, a dream fugue. The repetition in ‘New Age of Love’ belies the title, creating a dramatic tension:
I feel so lonely in your company…
I slipped away and I found the sun
That lonely feeling undone
Into a new age of love
I’ll never walk that path
Where I felt so lonely (in your company)
I felt so lonely (in your company)
“The Golden Hour’ puts on show Cloud Tangle’s increased use of percussion – delicate touches that create a driving insistent force under the chorus of layered vocals.
Final track ‘Bathe In Light’ has delicate intricate strings that skip in the ether, rousing and animated as a contrapuntal element to Ramsay’s ethereal insouciance as the album fades like the light at dusk.
The album ‘Dreaming Again showcases Cloud Tangle’s almost alien beauty: creating a distant universe of coldness, fragility and grace that glides over a gulf stream of warmth.
Out on 10 October, you can exclusively listen to and and pre-order the new album through the link below.
Cloud Tangle will be launching the album at the False Peaks Showcase event in Brisbane on 16 November 2024 with an amazing line up – details below and tickets here.
Feature Photograph: Thomas Calder
