RECORD REVIEW: Elizabeth Sanctuary Welding School for Girls, Reduction/Jane Eyre (2024)

 

RECORD REVIEW: Elizabeth Sanctuary Welding School for Girls, Reduction/Jane Eyre (2024)

you could have turned

endure looking like you'd rather not

and learned if it's still choking on your right

and if it looks exactly like you thought

even though it exists in a world outside of what i normally cover, Reduction / Jane Eyre, debut single from the Elizabeth Sanctuary Welding School for Girls (aka the single hardest artist to bring up in conversation when someone asks “who are you writing about this week?”) is either an introspective masterpiece or completely unlistenable, but i think it’s fucking brilliant. i’m a rock music writer, honest. i didn’t pay attention in art classes and i don’t go to drone shows. for a release like this i have absolutely no lexicon to fall back onto. this is one of those songs were i feel i need to be smarter to actually understand it. but i love it anyway.

it’s a rare thing in music to convey a sense of shaking fragility without getting on the audiences nerves but this is a rare example of that. i feel like i wasn’t supposed to hear this, like i’m intruding on someone else’s private thing and i’m about to completely fuck it up by writing about it but it 100% deserves the attention. the first track, Reduction, is Elliot Smith for the disaffected, fuzz pedal owning tiktok generation, masked by layers of distortion and cassette noise. it’s hauntingly beautiful in it’s execution and bequeaths to me a portrait of very real and understated portrait of depression which puts the audience in a strange, voyeuristic position that makes for great, if slightly intimidating art. 

side b, Jane Eyre, is much harder to actually write about. sonically it’s a wall of dirge like noise and feedback. it’s like the darker cuts from early Sonic Youth albums meet Aphex Twin’s beatless sophomore effort Selected Ambient Works Volume 2. it’s music you could fall asleep too, but i think actually doing that would put you in some kind of weird trance, or atleast give you some wacked out dreams. i’m too afraid to try it, so one of you should try it and write back to me.

any actual personal information online about the Elizabeth Sanctuary Welding School for Girls is, well, scant. i’ve met them, twice, and came away with that feeling that fake smart people like myself get when you meet someone who’s actually smart. like there was a game being played and i definitely lost. a glace at their website isn’t much better as you’re met with the very trendy y2k style visual vomit aesthetic that’s very trendy at the moment, complete with an entire section just for cat jpegs that took a full half an hour to load completely. i’m gonna budget some time tomorrow just for clicking all the widgets and doo-dads because i feel like there are secrets to be uncovered here. i’ve got to admit, i was hooked first not on the music but the mystery surrounding the artist themselves.  

 

as a listening experience it’s a fairly complete entity that stands on it’s own but does neatly fit into the current wellington dreamy-noise pop contingent. if you liked Mudgoose but thought his last single needed to be more transgressive, or if you like Feshh but think that using good quality studio equipment is “too commercial”, then the Elizabeth Sanctuary Welding School for Girls (if i believed in word counts i would mention this person in every single article, holy shit is this one inspired band name) should be at the top of your list. dreamy melodies, sublime lofi production and acute ear for folk-pop song writing (even if you have to listen to it 12 times to actually tell), this is an artist to watch for sure. 

it’s refreshing to find a release as good as this at a what is becoming a very dry month for wellington music. no one else has released anything interesting that i haven’t already talked about, all the good shows are next month, i got called a homophobic slur by some teenagers and the indian place i walked like half a hour into the weird part of wellington for forgot my rice and gave me a plain naan even though i paid for garlic.

final score: ****.8/5