Depths and Absence: The Resonant Sounds of Les Filles de Illighadad

What is the space of a song? What do you expect when you cue up a piece of music via the device of your choice: a kind of fullness of arrangement, the onrush of arrangements that one gets when listening to everyone from Arcade Fire to St. Vincent to The Ronettes? Or do you prefer something pared-down–something where a song’s arrangement doesn’t feel as though every conceivable instrument was incorporated into the mix, and perhaps even a few that could have been used were left out. It’s a minimalist approach: it pares a song down to its most basic elements, and leaves plenty of evocative spaces in its wake.

My first exposure to something like this came in 1996, when I saw the original lineup of The Spinanes play a show in New York. At the time, the group was a duo: singer/guitarist Rebecca Gates, and drummer Scott Plouf. Their first two albums, Manos and Strand (as well as the early EPs collected on the EP Imp Years) feature Gates’s impeccably-timed, evocatively-phrased songs and largely confined their arrangements to voice, guitar, and drums. You might hear a keyboard from time to time; on parts of Strand, a handful of backing vocals from Elliott Smith can be heard. But largely, these songs are given a greater energy in part due to the tension between the richness of the songs and the starkness of their arrangements. At the show…