The first entries in Lucy Gooch’s discography—a pair of five-track ambient pop EPs doused in reverb and multi-tracked glossolalia—suggested that the York, England musician was venturing deeper into the uncanny. Trading her Roland for a Prophet between the recording of 2020’s Rushing and 2021’s Rain’s Break, Gooch began to decorate her brief, beatless songs with more ornate synthesizer arrangements. While the former used sustained, misty drones as blank canvases for her interweaving choral arrangements, the latter felt more like a more traditional synth record, dropping plucky bass pulses and squelching arps into the chordal abyss to observe their behavior. Her emphasis on operatic vocal toplines and expressive delivery over lyrical prose have drawn comparisons to 4AD’s early catalog, particularly the entries by Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil, though her preference for unearthly, artificial textures was more aligned with Eno’s Apollo than the Baroque tastes of Robin Guthrie and Ivo Watts-Russell.
Gooch’s first full-length album, Desert Window, inverts her trajectory, weaving earthy, organic timbres into more ambitious compositions. Most songs stretch past five minutes as the record brings live string and brass arrangements along for a surprisingly dissonant ride, encasing straightforward moments of ethereal beauty between vast expanses of understated tension. In Cocteau Twins terms, it’s The Moon and the Melodies meets Twinlights.
The record’s two-part epic “Night Window” exemplifies her tendency to shift between these mystical and theatrical modes. In its first moments, insectoid synth drones swarm into the soundfield, melodies breaking from the cluster but never quite resolving. Gradually Gooch’s vocals come into focus, outlining the shapes of words that barely register as language. Typically, voice acts as a catalyst for crescendo in this sort of new age-adjacent composition, soaring above the ambient backdrop. Here, it’s intentionally submerged, tinting an already hazy composition. In the second half, more acoustic instrumentation enters the fray, with struck keys and brassy bleats teasing an emotional overflow. It’s the moments leading up to catharsis, though, that Gooch is interested in highlighting: the full 10-minute suite keeps the listener at a knife’s edge, holding out for the melodic phrase that makes sense of it all. Even waiting can be a thrill, when it’s well-composed.
Opener “Like Clay” is the biggest departure from Gooch’s earlier work, building from shimmery fingerpicked guitar into layer upon layer of interlocking takes, which loop and commune beneath a single, repeating couplet: “To wake up in morning, too long asleep/Like clay in the ground, exiled deep.” Though the words quite literally illustrate the record springing to life, they’re more like a vehicle for improvisation and experimentation. Her delivery slightly morphs with each go-around, and the surrounding harmonic ecosystem follows suit, background chirps becoming yawps as she adds a slight lilt to the end of a line. The folk trappings and ASMR-inducing field recordings on “Jack Hare” make for another fresh approach, particularly the tasteful way they decorate the song’s concluding burst of existential rumination, where Gooch mutters that “I am kiss, and I am croak, and I am wax,” and so on.
“Keep Pulling Me In,” Desert Window’s longest track, is the only song that feels more meandering than meaningful. Though Gooch cleverly uses repetitious traits of reverb and delay to accentuate lyrics about a tumultuous relationship, her instrumental choices feel directionless. There are blissed-out stretches of glossy stillness, creeping vocal leads, and even a shuffling drumbeat that pops out of left field: The individual sections are pretty but too self-contained compared to the rest of the record’s more fluid progression. It’s a stagnant stretch on an otherwise thrilling album.
Where Rushing and Rain’s Break worked in tight, polished pop increments, Desert Window privileges Gooch’s more eccentric instincts, conscripting strings, brass, and charged pockets of silence along the way. The record’s strongest moments originate in its audacity rather than precision: Desert Window opens up the ambient ideas she’s perfected in the past into riskier, roomier territory.
