Ex:Re - Save As (Indies Crystal Clear Vinyl)

There is no grand, overarching storyline to Save As, the second solo album from Elena Tonra’s Ex:Re project. Rather, the album – produced by Fabian Prynn and also featuring Josephine Stephenson on cello, Hinako Omori on synthesisers, Ben Reed on bass and Jethro Fox on electric guitar – is the latest in the Daughter lead singer’s catalogue of expert chronicles of the gnawing minutiae of human consciousness: the over-thinking that consumes us, and the places we travel to escape.

The title of album opener “Radio Station”, which begins with stately strummed acoustic guitar and morphs into a trippy song about an endless California roadtrip, is a metaphor for how Tonra feels about her mind. “I end up getting stuck because I can’t make decisions,” she says. Demo recordings live on in many of the final cuts, as on “Sleep”, which Tonra first recorded in a hotel room in Paris. The final version features a melodic loop made from the demo’s acoustic guitar run through a vocoder and a drum machine, which together offer a muffled quality to the sound, like hearing a party through a wall.

Other tracks, such as the stand-out “Am I Even Real?”, a Tonra-Prynn duet on which Tonra sings about spaceships to ask whether she is being true to herself in a relationship, found their true version in the studio. That combination of long-held ideas stored in notebooks and on laptops with unfiltered first thoughts and improvisations is key to the album’s perfect mingling of liveliness and deep thoughtfulness.

1. Radio Station
2. Sleep
3. Am I Even Real?
4. Two Chords
5. Save As
6. Frozen Aisle
7. Wasp
8. Language of Love
9. Healing (Slow)