Sleep / Displaced / Rise / November / For the Sake of the Song / No Sings of Pain / Trees Keep Growing / Favorite Cities / The Drinks We Drank Last Night / Just a Faint Line / These White Lights Will Bend to Make Blue / Raining in Athens / Rest Your Eyes / Hold On Love / Other Than This World
Azure Ray are/were one of my all-time favorite bands. Among artists who were still a going concern this decade they actually are my favorite, them and Underworld. Azure Ray is/was singers/songwriters Maria Taylor and Orenda Fink, with production assists by Andy LeMaster. Taylor and Fink split up a few years back to pursue solo projects that I’d also recommend and songs from which I nearly included in this mix; happily, they recently announced that they’re writing and playing together again in hopes of putting the group back together, so if you like what you hear here and exhaust their four releases–Azure Ray, Burn and Shiver, November, and Hold On Love–there will hopefully be more in store.
When my love for a particular band is very intense it gets difficult for me to describe exactly what it is I love so much about it. That’s not the case for movies or comics or anything else, just music. I can say that Azure Ray play largely acoustic music with an electronic veneer, kind of folk-y, lots of delicate girl-girl harmonies, a touch of Southern gothic, lyrics about memory and longing. I think the best way to put it is that if I were a glass and Azure Ray were a tuning fork, the frequency of their emotional content would shatter me.