Description
Label Review.
2019 album. Rock. Also available on Vinyl.
Our Overview.
‘Spinning Creature’ is the debut album from Cup, the duo of husband and wife team, Nels Cline, avant-garde guitar wizard and longtime Wilco member and Yuka C Honda, formerly the co-leader of the downtown New York ’90s-vintage cool-kid crew Cibo Matto.
Combining aspects of electronica, folk, improvisation, and some heated rocking, this debut recording ’perhaps predictably’ defies easy categorisation. But fear not! Contained within this package is a sometimes sweet, sometimes jarring, but always compelling excursion into what a shared sensibility sounds like, and after taking the journey that is ‘Spinning Creature’ it all feels just right as Cup’s music veers from the accessible to the abstract and back. This balance is what Cup music is all about. Nels and Yuka even sing a little here and there as they enter their singular sound world. And now you can enter it, too!
Cline and Honda spent three days recording ‘Spinning Creature’ in Brooklyn. They’ve got a whole process: They improvise in the studio together, and then Honda takes the sounds home, mixes them, and transforms them into songs.
You can hear a bit of that in the album’s title track, which has some way-out noises but which sounds like it’s been finely sculpted into a bubbly, comforting piece of laid-back quasi-pop. Cline and Honda sound great harmonising together on their wistful ba-ba-ba vocals, and Cline’s circular guitars pair nicely with Honda’s keyboard bloops. The track makes for a nicely off-kilter piece of bedroom-pop from two people who have been making accessible-but-experimental music for decades.