MAVEN GRACE + DIANA | 6th March | The Crofters Rights, Bristol
Evocative alt-indie-pop due MAVEN GRACE expand on the widespread acclaim of their debut album with a sweepingly cinematic live show!! What to Expect? REAL STRINGS, VINTAGE SYNTHS and layered vocals combine to entrancing effect.
One of the classical world’s most exciting new instrumentalists, Lithuanian-born DIANA Galvydyte brings a touch of ethereal grace with her otherworldy string improvisations.
Tickets:
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Searching for hope can take you to some extreme places – just ask the duo Henry Jack and Mary Home who make up Maven Grace. On their debut album Sleep Standing Up themes of bereavement, divorce and finding strength to keep going permeate lilting pop structures and expansive orchestral flourishes. These songs are borne out of personal journeys, and geographical ones too – trips that took them to Bryan Ferry’s Avonmore studio to record, and as far as Beijing’s underground music scene – as the pair sought to create defiantly positive music amidst turbulent times.
“All these songs have a sense of hope and empowerment” says Mary. “When people listen, I want them to understand that I’m saying ‘Trust me, it gets better’. Just keep going and things will turn around. In a way, Maven Grace itself embodies that idea, because we’re very old friends who support each other.”
For Mary, lockdown brought about heartbreak and the ending of marriage – referenced in the album’s opener Me Versus the Volcano and When the Butterflies Come Down – while Dark Blue Heaven addresses her formative experiences in clinics, witnessing ‘friends whose personalities literally disappeared under the effect of the ECT machine’. Meanwhile Henry’s job as a barrister specialising in international law has meant consistently witnessing the fallout of humanity at its most desperate. It’s perhaps no surprise that tracks like Lone Star’s maximal dreampop question identity, who we are and where we come from.
“That song in particular is about tracing the distance between childhood dreams and where we end up,” he says. “I’d been thinking about the old Roxy Music song 2HB, which I’d always thought was named after a pencil, but is in fact a reference to Humphrey Bogart. Somehow that got me thinking about Clark Gable and the idea that it’s not necessarily a good thing for your dreams to come true.”
Roxy Music is a name that quickly became synonymous with the duo. It was at an early Maven Grace gig at 2018’s Standon Calling that they caught the attention of Bryan Ferry as he watched them from the wings. That led to a conversation and subsequent invite to record at his Avonmore Studios in London. It was here the album took shape, as the duo pulled together demos first worked on in their respective homes. They were inspired by the array of analogue synths and keyboards, some of which still wore faded stickers saying things like ‘More than This settings…’ They were joined, too, by bassist Charlie Jones of fellow Roxy Music aficionados Goldfrapp. His bass playing provides the probing pulse of Time Stands Still’s roaming chamber pop.
However, the journey to complete Sleep Standing Up took them far beyond the rock canon. Diana Galvydyte, a member of the Lithuanian Philharmonic, was approached after Mary saw a clip on YouTube of her playing a Bruch Concerto. Handily enough, the only pop music she confessed to being a fan of was Roxy Music. It’s her string playing that is in some ways the glue of the album, filling in the space where needed at some points, gently alleviating or accentuating tension at others, and providing platforms from which songs will soar.
Henry and Mary also went out to The Conservatory in Beijing after getting to know erhu player Yu Hongmei via American professor of electronics Kenneth Sharp. The two-stringed instrument’s distinctive, almost human voice-like tones can be heard on Darkness. It was a journey to the Beijing underground and performances at several illicit gigs that perhaps left the deepest mark on Maven Grace’s music, though.
Using a contact at the Beijing Pop Festival, the duo played in a club called School situated under an old hutong. With Chinese authorities reticent to publicise hardcore punk and experimental sounds, the pair were taken by the local musicians’ desire to make and perform the music they love with no expectation that it would even bring them any attention, let alone fame and fortune. “Their attitude was that it’s worth doing for its own sake,” says Henry.
As such, Sleep Standing Up – whether coincidentally or otherwise – has the feel of a group who’ve been at it for years. It’s a record that feels so fully formed as a debut that you could be convinced it was their third or fourth album. From the wide-open spaces and lift-off of opening track Me Versus the Volcano’s Lynchian take on Sigur Ros and its slight melodic recall on the string-laden crescendos of Darkness, to When the Butterflies Come Down’s melancholy keys and graceful sonic arcs, each track retains its poise – a sense of sad grandeur – even as its subject matter invites the duo to be vulnerable.
