Kitty Empire 

Drinks: Hermits on Holiday review – a disappointing collaboration

Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley’s joint venture is more dissonant than you’d expect
  
  

Tim Presley and Cate Le Bon, collaborating as Drinks.
Tim Presley and Cate Le Bon, collaborating as Drinks. Photograph: Cara Robbins Photograph: Cara Robbins

Quite what one should expect from a collaboration between Welsh indie chanteuse Cate Le Bon and US DIY psychedelic outlier Tim Presley, latterly of White Fence, is unclear, but a record that looks to the 60s, tunefully, as album opener Laying Down the Rock does, was one possibility. Instead, the bulk of Hermits on Holiday is an angular, improvisational post-punk confection, a bit more dissonant and Savages and Field Music than you’d wager. As well as intoning, Le Bon can do a mean Nico impression – on Split the Beans – while both guitarists gleefully unfurl needling melodies and non-linear structures. Fun to make, clearly; less so to listen to.

 

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