Review: Venus Hum, The Colors in the Wheel

Ambient snippets provide the connective tissue between the album’s 10 songs.

Venus Hum, The Colors in the WheelVenus Hum’s The Colors in the Wheel begins deceptively with the understated, mostly acoustic “Turn Me Around.” The song’s static-y surface noise and loosey-goosey lyrics, however, remain constant throughout the rest of the Nashville-based trio’s second synth-pop effort. Kate Bush (or, seemingly, Kate Bush via Tori Amos’s industrial-pop period) is an admitted influence on lead singer Annette Strean, and the loopier she gets the better, as evidenced by the album’s best track “Genevieve’s Wheel,” which begins with the repetitive refrain “Genevieve and I used to talk about it” (leaving “it” completely ambiguous) and ending with a breathy list of names like Skylar, Trevan, and…Gary. The group takes a shot at Paisley Park pop on “Pink Champagne,” one of the album’s standout tracks, and succeeds surprisingly well, while “72 Degrees” sports the kind of rebellion that wouldn’t sound of place on Esthero’s Wikked Lil’ Grrrls. “72 Degrees,” like “Birds and Fishes” and “Surgery in the Sky,” feels underwritten and overproduced, but ambient snippets provide the connective tissue between the album’s 10 songs. While references to other artists give The Colors in the Wheel a sense of familiarity, they don’t give it a whole lot of originality—throughout the album, Venus Hum spins the titular wheel and lands on one of many musical colors. But rather than result in a mish-mash of influences, the trio manages to maintain an extremely consistent hue.

Score: 
 Label: Nettwerk  Release Date: July 13, 2006  Buy: Amazon

Sal Cinquemani

Sal Cinquemani is the co-founder and co-editor of Slant Magazine. His writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, Billboard, The Village Voice, and others. He is also an award-winning screenwriter/director and festival programmer.

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