The Original Faces

It’s a very strong album, one that I found myself wanting to listen to over and over again. Highly recommended.

It sounds, at times, less like a proper shoegaze act and more like a memory of one: the hooks as pronounced, but with an ineffable dreamlike quality thrown in, less something quantifiable than something to be experienced. Thankfully, this is an album that both satisfies and mystifies; both are welcome qualities.

A minor pleasure of the album is the beautiful way it's edited together, a gently manipulated impression of random accidents. [Sep 2015, p.47]

The Original Faces is very lovely indeed. [Oct 2015, p.77]

The warmth feels sweeter the longer you’ve spent inside.

It’s a record that celebrates the wonder of sound, with deceptively intricately songs under a balmy haze of reverb that gets better with each listen.

The memory of the dream’s worth nothing, but you’ll chase the feeling all day. This album is a lot like that.

Helen have turned out an otherwise pleasing debut, and it's nice to hear Harris pushing her otherwise ghostly music into lusher and sunnier places, but it doesn't prevent The Original Faces from feeling a little underdeveloped and like a missed opportunity by the band to take the kind of music they are making in more interesting directions.

These ninety-second-ish ditties are too gaunt and echo-ridden to stand alone as memorable singles, but within the tempestuous framework of the album, their vulnerability hits like a late-summer thunderstorm.

A tad more conventional than Liz Harris's ongoing work as Grouper, despite roots in C86 shambling and early-90s shoegaze, Helen's hazy, half-grasped songs are still several left turns from any standard indie fare. [Dec 2015, p.86]