(BMG)
*
Reviewer: Russell Baillie
That designer glum tag could also apply to Vessel, the Auckland duo of singer Laurie Piggot and instrumentalist Troy Sugrue. Their debut offering emerges as an exercise in marrying the dinner music end of trip-hop with Piggot's desperately theatrical delivery. It might have almost worked if the tunes were stronger, the arrangements less muzak, and the influences less obvious.
But as it is, the likes of Take Me Down (I'm Horny) suggest Portishead meets the Rocky Horror Picture Show (and there's a alternate French version titled M'Enflamme in case the word pretentious hadn't occurred earlier). While Worship Me tosses in a spot of Latin mass, soprano operatics and some very Catholic chat-up lines ("make an altar of my bed") which ... well, like much of this, it really has to be heard to be believed.
Vessel wins consolation points for probably getting more songs about sex on a New Zealand album than any other. But it's dead unsexy and leaves these ears wide shut.
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