Charlotte Spiral is a duo of vocalist Amy Spencer and multi-instrumentalist accomplice Avi Barath, two former Goldsmiths students now making stirring, yet endlessly fragile, music together.

Their debut EP, Ideal Life, contains three songs poised perilously on the tightrope between mournfulness and hope, each track a discrete soundworld of emotive layers over which Spencer’s tender, engaging vocal is allowed ample room to manoeuvre. ‘End Of Summer’ carries a tragic quality, its altered piano and gently shuffling jazz rhythm a perfect foil for Spencer’s quiet and understated anguish. There is a resigned tonality here, amplified by plaintive harmonies and a brutal, haunting dead stop following the line ‘Maybe this is the way it’s supposed to be.’

‘Wide Eyed’, with its unwavering Casio preset rhythm and languid, amorphous backdrop, is perhaps – by a whisker – the EP’s towering moment. We find ourselves being moved through Spencer’s innermost thoughts, comprising everything from a delicate defiance to a fear of being unloved, its diaristic outpourings laced with such pathos and longing that it would surely soften the heart of even the hardest and most curmudgeonly of souls, and whose arrangement stays with you long after it concludes.

Ideal Life by Charlotte Spiral is released February 7 2020. Charlotte Spiral play Servant Jazz Quarters on February 4 2020 – tickets can be purchased here.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2020 Further.