Staff Reviews

Tasseomancy - Do Easy

Review by Lee Adcock

This is a movie set, not a bold artistic statement»

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Tasseomancy aka Canadian twin sisters Sari and Romy Lightman, whose new album Do Easy. For the seasoned loners, stoners, and lackadaisically laid, Do Easy was written as a dead-beat anthem for a generation who was told that anything is possible after the possibility slows. Written in Toronto and Montreal, Do Easy was created as a lamp shade of hope; of soft survivalism. Serene, strange and magnetically sung, it honours its free-thinking forebears without being weighed down by them, creating immersive worlds of loving allusion. Soft synths and crystalline harmonies merge hypnotically on ‘Dead Can Dance and Neil Young’, an invitation to “fade into folk song”. If folk song this is, it’s folk of great idiosyncrasy, where vocoded chorales provide atmospheric shading and alto-saxophones drift like cigarette smoke from a David Lynch dream-film. Between the new age synth of Claudine and Annie, the ambient swoon of 29 Palms, Kate Bush-like prog-psych of Missoula and gently lapping title-track, Do Easy plays like pop from a parallel world. Sisters Sari and Romy Lightman are former members of queer cold-wave band, Austra. Channelling their former forays in psychedelic folk into a kind of lushly accessible, warmly experimental dream-pop along with bandmates Johnny Spence and Evan Cartwright, they explore manipulated sounds, all with mood in mind. Assisted by friends Brodie West (alto-sax), Ryan Driver (flute) Simone Schmidt (voice of a young Neil Young) and Alex Cowan (Blue Hawaii) that exploration reaches full bloom on Do Easy, the sound of a band hitting their richly imagined, luxuriously executed stride. And, wealth of evocative references included, making it all sound easy.
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