Bachelorette
The End of Things, Isolation Loops
Reviewed by Audra Schroeder, Fri., Jan. 21, 2011
Bachelorette
The End of Things (Drag City)Bachelorette
Isolation Loops (Drag City)New Zealand's history of turning pop music mutant was synthesized with Bachelorette, the solo project of Christchurch artist Annabel Alpers. Nuanced psych and electronica, her 2009 Drag City debut, My Electric Family, featured "The National Grid," a complex, layered rumination on technology and nature, two themes that inform Alpers' work. The Chicago label's reissue of 2005 EP The End of Things and 2006 full-length Isolation Loops, the former with new cover art, puts her catalog in context a bit more. Isolation Loops, so named because it was recorded "in isolation, in a hut, in Canterbury New Zealand," doesn't feel spare or empty. Alpers' menagerie of electronics and guitars produce a warm glow, as in "Doo-Wop" and "Subatomic Pop," with its sublime loops. "Complex History of a Dying Star" manages to sound like an interstellar choir. Further back, The End of Things shows where her scientific method started. From opener "My Electric Husband," Alpers revels in aloneness, whether touching on 1960s pop ("Song for a Boy") or minimal electro daydreams ("Pebbles and Dirt"), but it still feels like an experiment. That these two obscurities have been re-released in a time when dark electro is all the rage should be of no consequence; Alpers seems more concerned with the future tense than fads.
(Both) 
