Her Name Is Calla - The Quiet Lamb
- Written by Paul Brown
The five years since Her Name Is Calla’s first recordings have been punctuated by a steady stream of releases, but The Quiet Lamb represents their debut album (they apparently consider 2008’s The Heritage a mini album). Clearly they are not a band to be unduly rushed into anything, and they have recently pointed out the efforts they have made to ensure that the record is as perfect as it could be. This is quite a refreshing approach, really. You only get to make one debut album, and the age of accelerated consumption in which we live means that a band who are pressured into rushing out something half-cooked might never get a chance to rectify the situation.
The unhurried philosophy to producing the album is something which can be clearly discerned on listening, because it sounds painstakingly considered. It is an approach that fits Her Name is Calla’s sound perfectly, and the result is that The Quiet Lamb sounds utterly majestic. Like The Heritage before it, it is far from an easy listen, and its seventy plus minutes are splashed with far more dark shades than light ones, but it is a hugely well-executed piece of work. The attention to detail which has gone into it is clear from its sequencing. The album flows wonderfully, right from the portentous openings of ‘Moss Giant’, into the desolate, moody ‘A Blood Promise’, through to ‘Pour More Oil’, which sees the emotion that has built up finally being vented. There are times on the album where you find one song has drifted into another without you even noticing the transition, such is its smoothness and completeness.
One of the most impressive things about The Quiet Lamb is its diversity, which adds breadth to its grandeur, but never takes away any of its coherence. The combination of wintry beauty and bombast is underpinned by occasional departures in tone like the funereal folk of ‘Homecoming’, or the closing trio of ‘The Union’, which veers from triumphal otherworldly brilliance, to ambient beauty, to some kind of insane soundtrack to a sunset horseback pursuit. The album’s undoubted centre piece though is ‘Condor and River’, a gorgeous mini-epic which feels like the album in microcosm, building entirely at its own pace from placid beginnings into something so luxurious that seventeen minutes wash by in an instant.
With The Quiet Lamb, Her Name is Calla have managed to simultaneously build on their previous work and open up new doors. One of the key components in how good they are is the fact that they sound like no other band, a genuinely unique proposition who keep adding more and more components to their sound. Their decision to take things at their own pace has been entirely vindicated, because the album is a wonderful slow-burning success. Even if it takes another five years for them to follow up, it’s okay, because there’s plenty here to sustain us in the interim.