IN THE mind of Midnight Sister (aka artist, film-maker, and musician Juliana Giraffe, and composer Ari Balouzian ), it is always the 1970s, or rather, it is in the current guise their imagination has adopted.
Giraffe comes from a theatre background and it shows on an album where she inhabits a character and an era, and to paraphrase a song from those days, "she wears it well".
In the indie-esque, baroque-pop, of this sonic world, it is impossible to imagine Giraffe other than in a beret and brown knee-length skirt and boots; reclining in a living room of bean bag chairs, wood panelling, crocheted blankets, and shag carpeting; Roxy Music permanently on the record player (preferably Country Life or Stranded ).
If that sounds like the kind of world you would like to escape into for 40 or so minutes, then there are rewards for your ears. Opener 'Doctor Says' oozes cool sophistication in the verses, and a rocking, irresistible chorus; the sumptuous 'Foxes' is the reincarnation of 'Teenage Dream' era T.Rex; 'Sirens' is tasty funk-disco; while 'Dearly Departed' has the scope and ambition of mid-70s Roxy Music, without being pastiche, rather it becomes a springboard for Giraffe and Balouzian at their most ambitious.
The album momentarily steps back into the sixties with the delightful 'Wednesday Baby', which knowingly lifts the main melody from the Nico/Jackson Browne song 'These Days'. Throughout it all is Giraffe's husky, breathy voice, all detached cool, a long lost sister to Bryan Ferry.
Not everything works, at times the music veers towards 'sameness', the concept pushed to its limits and exhausted. Its arch knowingness and 'period detail' may be too much (or too contrived ) for some, but Painting The Roses has enough personality and striking moments to make it worth investigating.
