DAMON & NAOMI
The Sub Pop Years
(20|20|20/Stomp)
Wandering out of the late 80s/early 90s slowcore dream that was Galaxie 500, the rhythm section of Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang turned their attention to a much sparser landscape with Damon & Naomi. An intoxicating mixture of lost guitars, loping melodies and intertwined, siren-like vocals, the duo somehow wiped away all the static sound of their previous band to make music that was using so much less but in some ways achieved so much more.
This collection comprises the highlights of the duo’s seven years on the Sub Pop label, a period where along with labelmates like Codeine, a mirage of the most imperturbable sounds coalesced to make the slowcore side of the indie-rock genres an enriching, if all too brief, period of music.
Whereas artists such as Will Oldham exude a rural sense of space, Damon & Naomi shared spacious similarities but were never so landlocked to a time and place. The songs here shift from the electric guitar silt of ‘I’m Yours’ to the passionately acoustic (and here, captured live) ‘New York City’. Never associated with the by-numbers intimacy of folk music, there was always something overwhelmingly exotic and just out of reach about the songs that made up albums like Playback Singer and …With Ghosts – ‘Eye Of The Storm’ one example that finds Naomi stoic while guitars swirl ever so aimlessly back and forth around her.
Graceful and elegant isn’t how you describe the 15 songs here – it’s where you start on a journey into music that’s hasn’t aged at all. Somehow this duo took all that was sonically overwhelming about shoegazing’s way of speaking and brought it down to a whisper – all the while injecting an emotive force into their songs that easily eclipsed anything you could do with pedals and amplification.
HHHH     Jo Hill