Caethua comes from a singer and multi instrumentalist with four names from the American midwest. For stylistic reasons Clare Adrienne Cameron Hubbard separates her music into two EP’s. The first is incredibly sparse, gentle acoustic folk music, often with little more than her acoustic guitar and raw yet gentle vocals. It’s quite fragile and ramshackle, which of course taps straight into the emotions. The stand out is Lament which the lyrics keep flowing over and over with a stubborn childlike naivety. Many of the tunes here initially appear quite similar, however once seduced by their slow plodding charm the aforementioned Lament and Sons of the Hound really stand out and it’s primarily due to her bare beauty and the gentle tunefulness of her vocals. The second disc finds her substituting the guitar for the piano and a few (and I stress few) other instruments. It’s still as charmingly immediate and ramshackle as the first, kind’ve sweet but lo fi, simple repetitive plodding music over which her voice rises up from and then retreats. Her vocals actually sound like they were recorded in an open cavern and there’s a calmness to the way she intones that is slightly reminiscent of Cat Power. With organ, looped samples, even a rickety percussion on Highways in the Deathlight, there’s a certain eerie wonky quality to the music that feels not just intimate but quite beautiful in its own endearing and peculiar way.
Bob Baker Fish
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