Album Review

Abbe May – Design Desire

• 28th Apr 2011

Following the release of the well received single ‘Mammalian Locomotion’ Australian rocker Abbe May is back with her new single ‘Design Desire’. The video was directed by UK based Zena Loxton and filmed in a dried lake near Gin Gin in Western Australia.

The track itself is a glorious slab of genre splicing madness. The guitar and drums combine here to make an awesome, sludgy cacophony of garage-rock noise, whilst a dreamy, otherworldly vocal sits on top. Think Beth Gibbons backed by In Utero era Nirvana. It shouldn’t really work but it does.
More adventurous than her rootsy previous releases, (check out ‘Costanza’ for a lesson in meaty riffage) ‘Design Desire’ is a big leap forward for Abbe May, it still maintains the blues/rock crunch of her earlier work but has added that mysterious ‘other’ quality that will ensure its longevity.
The full album is out in the summer and if ‘Design Desire’ and ‘Mammalian Locomotion’ are anything to go by it looks as though Abbe May has tapped in to the kind of ethereal cool we thought was solely reserved for PJ Harvey. That can’t be a bad thing.