It’s a rare band that can make a visit to the dentist sounds like a kaleidoscopic, vari-coloured trip down the noir-pop rabbithole. But such is the world of the Blue Violets’ Coral Osborne, Kandle Osborne, and Louise Burns, where a mysterious undertow nags at an oceanic drone of teeming, delirious hooks and supernal three-part harmonies.
The Osbornes co-authored their first record together over the last five years or so, after a family move to tiny Shawnigan Lake threw the sisters into what Coral describes as “forced confinement”. Kandle was a neophyte guitarist-vocalist hung-up on the ugly-pretty dynamics of PJ Harvey and the melo-operatic swirl of the Brain Jonestown Massacre. Older sis Coral was looking for her voice; a life-long search that wound unprofitably through school choirs, amateur dramatics, and basement GarageBand recordings.
After a year and a half of idle noodling, the duo decided to audition one of their compositions for dad. As fate and genetics would have it, dad happened to be 54-40’s Neil Osborne, about whom one could reasonably say, He knows a good tune when he hears one.
“He asked us to go down to the basement to record it,” Coral says. “He played it back to us and we thought, ‘Whoa, this isn’t bad!’ And he was really excited. He said, ‘You know, if you keep this up, you could seriously go places.’ From there we were committed to making it work.”
The Osbornes woodshedded between then and now, chasing down thei …
It’s a rare band that can make a visit to the dentist sounds like a kaleidoscopic, vari-coloured trip down the noir-pop rabbithole. But such is the world of the Blue Violets’ Coral Osborne, Kandle Osborne, and Louise Burns, where a mysterious undertow nags at an oceanic drone of teeming, delirious hooks and supernal three-part harmonies.
The Osbornes co-authored their first record together over the last five years or so, after a family move to tiny Shawnigan Lake threw the sisters into what Coral describes as “forced confinement”. Kandle was a neophyte guitarist-vocalist hung-up on the ugly-pretty dynamics of PJ Harvey and the melo-operatic swirl of the Brain Jonestown Massacre. Older sis Coral was looking for her voice; a life-long search that wound unprofitably through school choirs, amateur dramatics, and basement GarageBand recordings.
After a year and a half of idle noodling, the duo decided to audition one of their compositions for dad. As fate and genetics would have it, dad happened to be 54-40’s Neil Osborne, about whom one could reasonably say, He knows a good tune when he hears one.
“He asked us to go down to the basement to record it,” Coral says. “He played it back to us and we thought, ‘Whoa, this isn’t bad!’ And he was really excited. He said, ‘You know, if you keep this up, you could seriously go places.’ From there we were committed to making it work.”
The Osbornes woodshedded between then and now, chasing down their sound until hitting on a heavy-ethereal balance captured abundantly and at-length in closing track “The Trance”. Coral calls it “our joke song”; a last-day-in-the-studio blowout that clocks in at six minutes of ever-increasing neo-lysergic drama. It’s the Velvet Underground, Joy Division, Killing Joke, and the weeping brides of Dracula all contained inside a Turkish Delight, as rococo as their album cover and as hallucinatory and scarily sexy as an Italian horror movie from the ‘70s.
But you could probably say that about the whole album, provided you also registered some of Coral, Kandle, and Louise’s musical and historical outer-coordinates, mapping the territory between Siouxsie and the Banshees, Concrete Blonde, the Breeders, Cat Power, and post-millennial trippers like the Warlocks or Black Mountain whenever Amber Webber opens her mouth and some Lovecraftian sound-entity pours out.
Indeed, it seems as though Coral’s search for her voice ends with The Blue Violets. She recalls being told by her father in elementary school, “Don’t put on a voice, sing with your real voice”.
“And I thought, ‘I don’t know what that means’,” Coral confesses. Eventually it clicked, and Coral’s “real voice” turned out to be an astonishing thing – deep, expressive, seasoned, sultry, commanding, a little spooky - especially when you hear the way she uses the deliberately paced plod of album opener “You Said” as a springboard for her own emotional exorcism. She admits, “Sometimes I hear it and wonder where it’s coming from…”
Kandle meanwhile furnishes “You Said” with a clanging solo that hits like a hammer on metal, viciously underlining the scorn at the heart of the song. From top-to-bottom, The Blue Violets is elevated by the grace and economy Kandle wrings from her instrument, with simple but expressive embellishments bringing heat to the lusty hymnal “Desire”; a fuzzed-out pre-chorus galvanizing the spooky “Gonna Getcha”; and “Diet” unwinding at a hypnotic pace with an array of tasty atmospherics.
All of which would come to nothing if didn’t hang from the no-nonsense bottom end of bassist Louise Burns, whose voice meshes with the Osbornes to furnish The Blue Violets with harmonies that veer from witchy, to celestial, to unnerving, to so unspeakably pretty they melt on the brainpan like a hot narcotic.
“I met Louise when I was 16,” Coral, now 20, recalls, “and I thought she was the smoothest person I ever met. There’s nobody as suave as Louise Burns, and she can play any instrument.” Burns tasted success early after forming Lillix 12 years ago at the age of 11. When she heard what the Osborne sisters were up to in the basement, she wanted in. “She wouldn’t back off about being involved,” says Coral. “It blew my mind.” Once on board, Burns furnished the newly minted Blue Violets with what Coral calls “structure and a veteran outlook on music we didn’t have.”
Burns is currently writing with the Osbornes. In the same way that she preternaturally compliments the Osborne’s voices, Louise has inserted herself into a creative team that Coral describes as “telepathic”. The sisters crafted The Blue Violets from everyday dramas, the learning process, and familial modes of communication that science fails to explain. Like “mouth-riffs”.
“I’ll go to Kandle with my mouth-riffs, and say, ‘Play this, der-ner-ner-ner-nerrrr!’” reveals Coral. “She has a good ear.”
Thematically, The Blue Violets also reflects the emotional proximity of its composers, marking its tales of “girls coming into their own” with ruminations on heartbreak that can be as intense as “Anorexic”, “Lay Down”, and “Sad On Me”, or as covertly goofy as “Busker” – which commemorates Kandle’s brief and probably ill-advised relationship with a homeless street entertainer. And in contrast to the simmering and heated “Desire”, we get “Sam”, which was inspired by a friend who just had her wisdom teeth removed.
Which brings us back to the beginning. The subject matter might be a little mundane in this one case, but in the sure hands of Coral, Kandle, and Louise, it becomes a chiming cathedral of sound - as blue as the ocean and as breathtaking as a violet.
-Adrian Mack
