Ocho sees electro-acoustic expeditionary and songsmith Stace Gill teaming up with producer DOS and guests Eanna Hickey, Gerry O’Connor (fiddle) and Lisa Cuthbert. Her formula is as winning one, using a blend of loops and beats that serve as an unsettling soundscape against which she can paint portraits of love and life.
There are hints of Enya, pared down for indie kids. The effect is powerful. ‘The Turn’ is drenched in strings, sprinkled with subtle electro blips around Gill’s looped vocals, conjuring a mesmerising melange on a tune about the fragility of love. Her duet with Eanna Hickey on his ‘Spin A Rope’ is welded to a dense ethereal backing and is, quite genuinely, sublime. The sparse piano opening and shimmering strings on ‘Spare Face’ confirm Ocho’s talent for adding just enough to flesh out a song rather than smothering it. The title track is truly hypnotic, with Gill’s harmonised vocals floating atop a piano loop complete with vinyl surface noise (although to these ears, the industrial percussion seems clunky).
The album is worth snaffling for the superb re-working of the Phil Spector classic ‘Be My Baby’, replete with an underlying menace worthy of the killer himself. Gill has drawn comparisons with Bat For Lashes and Imogen Heap, but she is very much her own woman making her own music, with a heap of help from some hugely-talented friends. A hugely impressive debut.