Hearts of Animals
(MP3) Hearts of Animals - Maybe
Hearts of Animals - Cave Lights
2008 ArtStorm Records #002
Hand silkscreened cover CD-R
Cave Lights is the first full length release by Hearts of Animals since 2007’s acclaimed Lemming Baby. Burned in the plastic are the things we’ve come to admire from Mlee Suprean – a sharp melodic sense, expressive vocal phrasing, singular arrangements, and her distinctive lyrical sensibility. Yet, whereas Lemming Baby was a thematically unified work, Cave Lights sets its sights toward a broader sense of experimentation without sacrificing the qualities that make Hearts of Animals unique. Abstract tone poems like The Next Day find themselves alongside the cheeky electro-trash of Pillow Fight and Cave Lights even employs the vocal talents of Joe Mathlete to great dramatic effect in Versus. Fans of her previous work will recognize the lyrical gift, gorgeous melodies, dense DIY arrangements of Sit Right Here and the stripped bare emotions of Drain Me which lays out a soft plaintive performance and sweet melody that exposes a broken heart that is as beautiful as it is weary. To simply rewrite her last album would have been easy but Cave Lights is an expansion of Mlee Suprean’s already broad palate of melody, emotion, and aural seascapes that reflect an artist unafraid to take risks and unwilling to sit still. - Ramon Medina
Houston Press Cave Lights Review
Hearts of Animals’ Cave Lights, the second release by ArtStorm records - yes, another fledgling local label - constructs another level of frontwoman and sole proprietor Mlee Suprean’s icy fortress of solitude. Like HOA’s 2007 single “Stars Say No,” Cave Lights traffics in pinballing high-frequency sounds, layered artificial percussion and fragile vocal melodies that draw on the Cocteau Twins and other 4AD bands of the mid-to-late ‘80s.
However, the first two tracks, “Maybe Maybe Maybe” and “The Next Day,” are much less structured and guitar-oriented than her previous work, instead consisting of fractured echo chambers where tones coalesce and dissolve around ethereal themes. The balance of the album is more conventional, at least for HOA - Suprean forgoes some of her weirdest noises, but she shows no signs of tempering the heavy delay that gives her music its kaleidoscopic quality.
It makes her songs deceptively dense, adding extra layers to simple, pretty tunes like “Sister Stories;” it also allows her to blend a mournful accordion smoothly into the sorrowful electro-pop of “Sit Right Here.” This last points to an important aspect of HOA’s music: it’s surprisingly sad, both harmonically and lyrically. Even the two instrumentals are minor-key, including the stunning untitled saxophone ensemble that closes the album. Cave Lights touches repeatedly on themes of departure and withdrawal into unreality, creating a fantasy which provides no escape- only crippled isolation dressed up in distracting colors, like sparkling lights in a dead-end cave.
Volcanic Tongue Records Review
New full-length CD-R with silkscreened sleeves from the dream-pop project of Mlee Suprean. Following on from her single on Dull Knife, Cave Lights combines aspects of hallucinated exotica, soft, percussive melodies and a DIY take on ecstatic pop that references UK art rock like The Adult Net, AC Marias and Dome while conjuring visions of orchestrated Polynesian synth variations and moving deeper into the whole lonesome female vox school of US Girls/Grouper et al.
Houston Press
Even in a city whose musical denizens have a well-documented propensity for band-hopping, Mlee Marie Suprean is an especially prolific co-conspirator. Her shimmering and coyly pretty voice, elegantly phrased guitar work and slightly skewed pop sensibility can be found in no fewer than four consistent projects, with frequent cameos in others. She’s like Joe Mathlete in reverse. While Suprean’s efforts are well realized in each of her many musical incarnations, Hearts of Animals is where she truly shines. There’s room for a little bit of everything in HOA, yet the music never feels like a kitchen-sink contrivance. Superb songcraft and a delicate touch allow Suprean to create music that is at once astonishingly heavy and gossamer-light; under her spell, seemingly disparate concepts and styles play nicely with one another. Dense noise provides the perfect foil for power-pop sugar; cheaply effective Casio beats underscore stabbing waves of pseudo-shoegaze psychedelia. This is musical magical realism to turn Gabriel García Márquez green-eyed with envy. - Nicholas L. Hall