Perhaps best known for his celebrated production work with Talk Talk and Catherine Wheel (often dubbed the silent member of the former group), legendary UK producer Tim Friese-Greene is also an impressive artist in his own right. His new music projectShort-Haired Domestic features stunning vocals by wife Lee Friese-Greene of 90’s London Riot Grrl band Sidi Bou Said and currently lead vocalist and guitar player for Pavlova.
Their new single ‘A song in Spanish addressed to men who drive big cars’ is the second offering from their forthcoming self-titled debut album, slated for release in autumn.
“It’s bothered me for some time, this questions about why men think they will impress or pull women because they have a big, expensive car. I honestly don’t get it. To me it is about the least sexy or attractive thing a person could own. But yet it persists: the advertising may have become more nuanced but it’s still the same message. Anyway, that was mulling around my mind when the whole #metoo thing kicked off – the Harvey Weinsteins & the Trumps of this world who live under this assumption that money and power and big cars, will get you sex,” says Lee Friese-Greene.
“So this song is about that. Only women are in the driving seat now. And we will call them out. We know that their big cars are just thinly veiled substitutes for their inferior manhoods and complete lack of soul, empathy and humanity. We call time on that. It’s about karma; ‘Todos tenemos lo que merecemos’ – we only get what we deserve.”
The duo recently released their new video for ‘A song in Latin about the importance of comfortable shoes’ (produced by Dylan Friese-Greene and filmed by Jake Friese-Greene), the first song from their debut double A-side single ‘A song in Latin… A song in Hindi…’.
Apart from is work with Talk Talk and Catherine Wheel, Friese-Greene has also produced works by Lush, Thomas Dolby, Sidi Bou Said and Firefly Burning. AllMusic describes him as “renowned for his unerring sense of atmosphere and nuance, Tim Friese-Greene was among the most innovative — albeit underrecognized — producers of his era”.
After 1995, he shifted his primary focus to creating music as a solo artist, issuing various releases under his own name and as Heligoland. Short-Haired Domestic is the next step in a logical progression for this producer.
Each track on the new album features vocals in a different language. At their heart are a breakbeat loop, sampled fragments, scratching, insistent funk and Latin rhythms, surprising appearances of acoustic guitar and just about every sound that’s possible to wring from a WASP synthesizer.
The result is melancholic and driven with a pop edge and sensibility. Avoiding any whiff of ‘divaness’ in the vocals, these songs instead allow emotion to be largely generated by the music as a response to the lyric.
‘A song in Spanish addressed to men who drive big cars’ is out Friday, July 24 via Bandcamp, where ‘A song in Latin… A song in Hindi…’ is already available. Later this summer, the duo shall release their debut eponymous album on vinyl and CD, as well as digitally across digital platforms.
