It’s likely many who came to Reb Fountain’s Taite Prize-winning, self-titled 2020 album – which sprung her arresting Don’t You Know Who I Am – were unaware of her three previous albums, the Hopeful & Hopeless EP, early singles and her peripatetic life.
They took Reb Fountain as the exceptional album it was, but may not have followed her to 2021′s multi-layered and genre-jumping Iris album, or her covers of OMC’s How Bizarre (delivered like a walk on Lou’s wild side) and the Lennon-Ono Happy Xmas/War is Over.
Her journey to How Love Bends – from early country-folk stylings to more recent art music inclinations – has been as enigmatic as revealing.
With her band of multi-instrumentalist Dave Khan (co-producing with Simon Gooding), bassist Karin Canzek and drummer Earl Robinson, Fountain steps toward seductively ethereal trip-hop, notably on the opener Come Down with the appropriated Stone Roses’ line “I wanna be adored” slipping in seamlessly.
Forever explores spare, incantatory funk, swooning 1980s synth-pop (“we’ll live forever”) and a hint of prog-rock; Over Joy/ed is a stately piano ballad; the downbeat Drake is cinematically Gothic.
Everyday Fitness is a glorious ballad (which might have benefited from a more restrained arrangement), He Commands You to Jump into the Sea opens with spoken word over a steady pulse and on the six-minute closer Memorial, she again moves adeptly from a croaking world-weariness speak-sing to a dramatic Patti Smith-like crescendo.
Everywhere, Fountain lets the lyrics and musical settings convey mystery or heightened emotion as she deals with the fog of the past and a new relationship.
Nothing Like moves from references to exile, a bad dream and dying to “there’s nothin’ like new love to raise your head, nothing like falling for wings to spread … nothin’ like dreaming for cheating death”. When Fountain falls, her wings spread wide and creative dreaming begins.
How Love Bends is available digitally, on CD and vinyl.
How Love Bends tour: Totara Street, Tauranga, April 10; Dome Cinema, Gisborne, April 11; MTG Century Theatre, Napier, April 12; Last Place, Hamilton, April 17; Leigh Sawmill, Leigh, April 19; Grainstore Gallery, Ōamaru, April 25; Errick’s, Dunedin, April 26; Sherwood, Queenstown, April 27; The Church, Christchurch, May 1; Opera House, Wellington, May 2; Town Hall, Auckland, May 3.
