This came out in 2001 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
“Everybody knows that you’ll be leaving / Leaving me behind / And everybody knows what’s gonna happen / I’m gonna lose my mind.”
Welcome to the unending tunnel of darkness that is Thalia Zedek’s world — and has been ever since her days fronting indie and punk band like Live Skull, Uzi and the terrifyingly bleak, staggeringly powerful Come. On Been Here and Gone, her first official solo album, Zedek takes an approach that’s quieter and more introspective but not one iota less intense. These 11 ballads are burnished gems all — torchy, tortured tales (like the above Excommunications) of poisoned love, dangerous obsession and cancerous heartache, made all the more agonizing and tense by the contradiction between the narcotic, sparse arrangements and Zedek’s gruff, rasping vocals. If Nick Cave and Patti Smith wrote songs for Marianne Faithfull to sing with The Velvet Underground, it might sound something like this.
