Claire Dickson – The Beholder Review

What does Claire Dickson sound like?

When your dreams feel perfectly sane but the ambient noises aren’t quite right.

The review of Claire Dickson – The Beholder

Usually, songs evolve as verse-chorus-verse structures that draw you in with their familiarity, rhythms and hooks. Claire Dickson largely ignores this structure for what she calls “through-composed” songs. They shapeshift through moods, rarely repeat phrases and shift focus, tone and thought across their runtime. They are also largely composed from Claire’s own vocals, found sounds and electronic percussion. This is an album made for lovers of esoteric ideas.

‘The Beholder’ floats in the audio space of ambient experimental art pop. Claire sings and there are vocal refrains but you rarely get big hooks and traditional song structures. Instead, it’s like we are dream weaving. Static noise, vocal snippets stuck on vinyl and electronic pulses open our ears with the ethereal opening track. ‘Tug on the Sleep Veil’ is warm and inviting – coaxing you in. It gives way to the slow-motion drum loops and twisted noises of ‘Throw my Desire’. Warm turns to moist as surges of aural keyboards and choral arrangements ooze out. As their steam overflows, Claire’s breathing becomes its own instrument as desire becomes more sinister. The use of bass clarinet to sound the bass alarm adds texture too.

‘Your House’ channels Olga Bell but also how dreams sound. Percussive loops are out of time and stuck keyboard loops pitch shift out of tune – but neither work in tandem. The pounding drums and thick bass sound foreboding whilst other found sounds are rhythmically correct but tonally all over the place. This track – and by extension the whole album – sounds like how a dream feels. You might be talking to a cat that barks back and it’s totally fine in the dream and you only realise it’s weird when you remember it. Claire Dickson does this by peppering her music with unusual sounds that are in the right place but throw everything off. ‘You Don’t Stop’ noodles abstract acoustic guitar with vinyl static and layers of Dickson’s voice caressing you. Here it is like having lots of half melodies making a whole, leaving you to piece together the abstract sounds how you see fit.

Field recordings washed into white noise and metallic bells jangle around the rubbery synths of ‘In The Night’. Mystical, untethered and dynamic, it showcases how Claire’s approach to this album mixes two vastly different ideas. With all the bold synths sounding expansive, rich and panoramic you have an overwhelming rush on one hand. With all the field sounds and tiny pocket instruments making the rest of the sounds you have something intimate and dare I say sensual. The effects are definitely designed to tickle your senses because they sound hyper-real in the production. ‘The Beholder’ exemplifies this idea as much of the track plays with tiny rattles, clicks, shakes, bells and soft ambience. Think Bjork’s ‘Vespertine’ but with a freeform song structure and layers of vocals and you are in the right arena. Compelling and intimate yet otherworldly and freeform.

One of the rare moments of melodic strength and clear song structure is the excellent ‘Thrill of Still’. Brass underpins some taut and conflicted synth riffs that throb under a whirlpool of vocal snippets. A lot of the album sounds like time has stopped and this track sounds like time itself is falling inside itself. If the instrumentation wasn’t so dreamy and angelic, the music would be quite creepy. Instead, ‘Skin of Words’ meets that creepiness head on. The opening half of the track is stripped-back piano and vocal and to say the chord progression veers into curiously detuned strangeness would be an understatement. As the track moves into a bustling synth orchestra the edges of the unusual chords blur away and what was slightly uncomfortable becomes serene. It is funny how rounding off the edges of sounds makes things more approachable. ‘Talon’s closes out the album in abstract fashion just as it started. A flurry of empty pulses and odd noises raise Claire’s fantastic vocal arrangement aloft like a parable.

In and out in under half an hour, ‘The Beholder’ is brief but crams so much in. The clever production makes you question so much of what you hear. Was that reversed? Is that sound creepy or just unusual? That’s not the drumbeat I expected, where did it go? It is an album you can go back to and tune into a different frequency of it and get a completely different experience too. This is an album that is equal parts angelic and darkly sinister simultaneously. Each listen is a new ride. Claire Dickson has created a truly experimental gem and I hope you give it time and attention to take you to a different world.

Recommended track: Your House

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