Lavender Diamond - Incorruptible Heart
On 8th October Paracadute will release Incorruptible Heart, the long-awaited follow-up to Lavender Diamond’s 2007 full-length debut, Imagine Our Love.
The Los Angeles-based quartet - comprising Becky Stark (vocals), Jeff Rosenberg (guitar), Steve Gregoropolous (piano) and Ron Regé Jr. (drums) - recorded the album with OK Go’s Damian Kulash and longtime Flaming Lips collaborator Dave Fridmann at Fridmann's upstate New York base.
Incorruptible Heart's diamond-light shines through its every facet from strings performed by The Calder Quartet and horns by longtime Brian Wilson compatriot Probyn Gregory to magical cover art by drummer (and graphic novelist) Regé and the singular, celestial voice of Stark.
Since Imagine Our Love, Stark has performed with The Decemberists, She & Him, the L.A. Ladies Choir, The Living Sisters and has released a 7-inch with actor John C. Reilly on Jack White's Third Man label.
She has also appeared in films alongside Harry Shearer (The Simpsons, This is Spinal Tap) and Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon - which perhaps helps explain why Incorruptible Heart was two years in the making.
While heartbreak is a central theme of Incorruptible Heart, Lavender Diamond renders sorrow with a kaleidoscopic brilliance. The exquisite album opener - and first single - ‘Everybody’s Heart’s Breaking Now’ is simultaneously shimmering and sobering in its examination of global issues.
Songs like ‘Just Passing By’ and ‘Come Home’ grapple with loss, but Lavender Diamond posits that heartache is just as essential to the cycle of love as celebration (the latter is wonderfully evoked in ‘Oh My Beautiful World’).
"Oh what makes us breaks us apart/And it takes us right to the heart," sings Stark in ‘Dragonfly’. "And it shakes us/And gives us a start /And it wakes us/And opens our arms."
Turning from soaring electro-pop (‘Light My Way’) to joyful revelry (‘Perfect Love’, featuring M. Ward on guitar) to the ethereal, operatic (‘All The Stars’), this is a work of bold and uncompromising creativity that cuts through the hyper-saturation of modern life, straight and true as an arrow mounted on a light beam.
The track listing for Incorruptible Heart is as follows:
1. Everybody’s Heart’s Breaking Now
2. Dragonfly
3. I Don’t Recall
4. Just Passing By
5. Teach Me How to Waken
6. Come Home
7. Forgive
8. Light My Way
9. Oh My Beautiful World
10. Perfect Love
11. Everybody’s Song
12. All The Stars