Album Notes

A remastered reissue of 'Ardor' with additional songs was just released in October 2007. Please see http://cdbaby.com/cd/lsd7 for more info and purchasing!

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Love Spirals Downwards are the unconscious mind of ethereal music, evoking forgotten memories with subjective, alien tongues. The sounds drift dreamily through one's thoughts like incense permeates the air -- perhaps the spicy fragrance will seduce you like a lover to its heat, or else it will elude the threshold of perception and weave itself into the mind's strata of buried experiences...

Ardor, the sophomore offering of multi-instrumentalist and producer, Ryan Lum, and vocalist, Suzanne Perry, features the signature swirling guitars, minimal bass lines and slow paced tempos of the burgeoning Dream Pop genre, but Perry's ethereal style of vocal harmonies set them apart from their more rock-based contemporaries. Dreamy and romantic sounding, Ardor is rich in atmosphere with lush layers of ethereal guitar textures and jangly acoustic guitars supported by simple, yet driving, rhythm sections.

While similar to their previous album in some regards, this second release has a much more polished and mature sound from the drum programming through to Perry's extended use of English lyrics. Whereas Idylls was almost entirely composed of nonsense sounds, this album contains 6 intelligible songs (one being a cover of Black Tape for a Blue Girl's "Tear Love From My Mind"). Both the opening track, "Will You Fade," and "Write in Water" have lovely lyrics with strong choruses that provide a "catchiness" some earlier pieces may have lacked. "Subsequently" mimics French rather satisfactorily, while "Sidhe" gives off the aura of an ancient Judeo Christian chant (though it's actually the vocals for "Tear Love From My Mind" cleverly run backwards). Jennifer Ryan Fuller joined them for two tracks including the popular duet, "Depression Glass," and the first stirrings of Ever's dubby electronic stylings, "Sunset Bell" (which was later remixed for 1998's Flux).

Over their 8 year history, Love Spirals Downwards released 4 albums; Idylls (1992), Ardor (1994), Ever (1996), and Flux (1998), 1 single, Sideways Forest (1996), and 1 retrospective collection, Temporal (2000), incorporating the styles of ethereal rock, world music, ambient/new age, and electronica to create a sound uniquely their own.

Comparisons have been made by critics to Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, Enya, Enigma, Slowdive, and The Sundays.