18 March 2020

Artist: Hilary Woods

Who: Compelling Irish singer/songwriter who played bass in the shamefully underrated indie rock band JJ72 despite two cracking albums and spectacular gigs. The trio split up in 2006. Woods turned her back to music for several years, went to art school and became a mother. She came back in 2018 with solo debut album Colt and a whole different sonic and substantive approach.

Album: Birthmarks – second LP, released 13 March 2020

Loud And Quiet webzine wrote: “For all the hard work Dublin-based composer Hilary
Woods has done over the last few years, she’s yet to produce an album that ably straddles,
her twin sensibilities – as a mood-driven producer of tone poems, and a tantalisingly elliptical storyteller. Birthmarks, an LP two years in the making and a meditation on future uncertainty and childbirth, comes close to essential – but, recalling a black metal version of Cocteau Twins’ verdant collaboration with Harold Budd on The Moon and the Melodies, it also flexes the skill of its producer-collaborator, frequent dabbler in noise music and extreme metal, Lasse Marhaug.”. Full review here. Score: 8/10.

TUTV says: Expect fascinating, hallucinatory candlelight soundscapes with a ghostly
and at times surreal resonance. Woods‘ both shadowy and motherly voice, the lo-fi orchestration and that spooky cello will make you silent and listen with a tense feeling.
A phantasmagoric experience.

Get impressed here…

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Here’s the absorbing video clip for top track ‘Orange Tree‘…

HILARY WOODS: Facebook

(photo: promo cover album Hilary Woods via FB)