Join us this Friday, September 13th for Yu Su’s debut live Ambientale performance at In Sheep’s Clothing HQ. Born in Kaifeng, a city in central China’s Henan province, […]
Reissued: Hugo Largo’s Two Albums for Eno’s Opal Records
Slowcore before there was such a term. Hints of shoegaze and shimmering ambient music. Early post-rock. Released by Brian Eno’s label. Born New York City in the 1980s. That’s Hugo Largo, a project that, after decades of latency, has resurfaced to offer their two unsung, ethereal records, Drum and Mettle, to streaming services. Their label, Missing Piece, has also pressed them on vinyl for the first time since their original release.
Originally issued when underground New York was focused on Sonic Youth-ian dissonance, volume and confusion and the commercial world was discovering early rap, mainstream new wave and buoyant freestyle, Hugo Largo ditched drums and beats, minimized the six-stringed guitar, avoided keyboards and focused on two bassists, a violist and singer Mimi Goese.
They were obviously indebted to the delicate stuff coming out on 4AD, especially the Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil, and hint at the work of Kate Bush and Tim Buckley. But Hugo Largo drew its power from its five borough upbringing, merging stuff that venues like the Kitchen and Danceteria were doing downtown with the post-punk, detuned ethos of radical reinvention.
Bassists Tim Sommer and Adam Peacock and violinist Hahn Rowe played in composer Glenn Branca’s overwhelming works for amassed guitar. The string-driven lines on “Blue Blanket” manage to simultaneously combine Robin Guthrie’s glistening tones and Sonic Youth’s oblong, wrongly right chords.
Add in Goese, who apparently used to perform “Second Skin” while gliding a knife across her neck, and the result is stuff that remains striking 30-plus years later. St. Vincent should cover the entirety of Mettle.
Author and critic Simon Reynolds, who contemporaneously wrote about Hugo Largo in Melody Maker — as did his now-wife, the great Joy Press — offered an excellent description of Hugo Largo’s aesthetic on his Blissblog.
The songs were slow, still, soft…. yet suggestive of great tensile strength… and often piercingly dramatic, bursting with overflowing emotion. Echoes of Young Marble Giants, pointers towards slowcore and that kind of thing, but also, obliquely, maybe Earwig / Insides…. various other groups on the edge of things – outfits too original and one-off in their conception and execution to be shunted into any kind of scene or movement.
In addition to the streaming service arrival, Hugo Largo has built a box set that features both Drum and Mettle, as well as a third LP of live recordings and unreleased tracks — including their phenomenal cover of the Kinks’ “Fancy.” They’ve also produced a double-CD version.
