Album Review: Daughter - If You Leave

Elena Tonra, Igor Haefeli and Remi Aguilella are Daughter; fragile unearthly English folk-rock indie darlings Pitchfork ho hum yes you get the idea etcetera, and If You Leave is their debut long player. 

If You Leave is not a bad record; it's a sigh, breathless, drawn out, scratching, a jilted expulsion. The record's strength is burrowed in the lyrics – Freud's interpretation of a Wes Anderson forest fable through Elena Tonra: sex and death and foxes and woods, or something like that. Compare: Lifeforms, “Stop your growing limbs” sings Elena, against “find the children who were discretely killed in infancy” (is somebody cryptically pro-life? Abortion on an indie-folk record? Yikes.) Whereas the stunning Youth ought to have been part of the climb, it's the peak: as a record, If You Leave hangs from 2011's The Wild Youth EP's standout single, and doesn't do anything new. 

As per The Wild Youth EP, track by track, If You Leave abducts childhood nightmares and uncages them into the sturm und drang of an on-again/off-again couple: “woken up like an animal/teeth ready for sinking in the minds lost in bleak visions”, according to Human. It's the sex-life of a twenty-something transmuted into a Brothers Grimm fairytale that just happens to sound a lot like Leslie Feist - complete with scratching steel-string guitar and foggy synths. The concept and the beckoning manic indie sympathy-appeal is all a bit indulgent, but honestly, welcome to zeitgeist 2013: everything is indulged. It's a little disappointing the band haven't sailed further from the shore they mapped in their first three EPs, but If You Leave confirms that Daughter are worth paying attention to.