LAVENDER DIAMOND - Imagine Our Love Review

Up until now, 2007 had been looking a bit thin on the ground for totally ace new bands, but never fear - Lavender Diamond have arrived like a shaft of summer sunshine on the afternoon of a perfect festival to put that right, the musical equivalent of a picnic basket filled with never-ending strawberries, cream and pink champagne....full text In the song "Garden Rose," on Lavender Diamond's first full-length, Becky Stark sings, "I started to remember how to live in present time." Odd, since Stark seems thoroughly anti-modern. With her crystalline, beautiful voice and thrift-store style, she harks back at least to original folk chanteuses like Joni Mitchell, if not further to 1920s Broadway songbirds. Imagine Our Love is certainly unlike anything that's ever been on Matador: I don't think there is a plugged-in guitar on any of the album's twelve tracks. But what's electric -- and what makes the album so successful -- is that voice of Stark's and the purely positive worldview she emotes through it....full text These arch-hippies from Los Angeles are oddly adorable and certainly well connected — the singer Becky Stark is an old pal of Devendra Banhart and once shared a flat with Jenny Lewis.

Yet despite the rather twee artwork (drawn by the drummer Ron Regé), their variation on new American folk music, produced by the ubiquitous Thom Monahan, is often surprisingly strident. ...full text