Christy & Emily: No Rest (Klangbad)

Brooklyn-based duo Christy & Emily have certainly attracted influential fans. Towards the end of 2009, they released an album on Big Print, the label owned by Robert Lloyd of the Nightingales, and now they unveil its successor, produced by Hans Joachim Irmler – keyboardist and co-founder of prog legends Faust – at his Klangbad studio in Germany.

It’s seemingly an odd – yet strangely complementary – pairing, joining together classically trained pianist Emily Manzo with Christy Edwards, who has played in a number of guitar bands. This third outing from the duo continues a vein of minimalism, dominated by pattering drums and skeletal guitar, peppered with intricate flourishes of melody.

At its best, No Rest manages to conjure intensity from the barest of ingredients, especially on the delightful ‘Little World’, which welds electric folk to the kind of hazy psych normally associated with acts like MV&EE while its long, fading outro hints at haunting exotica with spectral percussion.

Despite a surfeit of ideas, not all of them are transformed successfully enough to meet their potential. Instead, the first two tracks appear to be almost suites of conjoined song fragments, but without a strong sense that they hang together well. Each section has its own merits but the overriding feeling is that they sometimes amount to less than the sum of their parts.

Spare production, courtesy of adds a stark, often claustrophobic feel throughout the record, with the exception being the more expansive closing track, ‘Amaryllis’, which stems from a baroque piano melody before giving way to heavy piano chords, stabbing strings and close-knit harmonies.

There are certainly some exhilarating moments on No Rest, though it’s hard to escape the feeling that these bursts of inspiration don’t make for a cohesive and complete album - there’s enough of note to warrant a few plays, but you might want to use the skip button on repeated listens. However, at their best Christy & Emily are capable of conjuring beautiful arrangements, so you’d be advised to keep an eye on the duo, not necessarily despite but rather because of this curate’s egg of a record.