La Force - XO SKELETON

Engle sets the emotional controls for the heart of the moon, stirring up gothy atmospheres on the slow-dance Cocteau Twins of Conditions Of Us or spinning through A Forest on the title track. The Bat For Lashes smoke-and-mirrors of Outrun The Sun and How Do You Love A Man’s minimal Lana Del Ray moves are supple pop, saxophone and synth supporting Engle’s taste for theatre. All the ethereal turmoil, though, can’t mask XO Skeleton’s good songwriting bones. – MOJO

Mesmerising… Engle’s new album is a treasure trove of delights, taking in everything from spectral R&B to haunted pop. It also has a rare kind of intimacy which pulls you further into her world. – Crack

“condition of us” is accomplished, passionate and slick. I love it.” – Guy Garvey, BBC Radio 6 Music

Engle’s voice, wise and warm, envelopes the track, [..] Her words wrap around the music in odd ways at times, like a stream of consciousness versus melody, but the love that’s beaming from Engle is undeniable. If this is just the beginning of XO Skeleton, we can’t wait to explore what else it has in store for us. – CBC Music

Her vocals are full-bodied, at once commanding and caressing. The smoky, lyrical bass is something mid-70s Joni Mitchell would have given a big thumbs up, while the sax abstractions bring to mind the most affecting moments in Bon Iver’s fusion of folk and soul-searching electronica. – Shindig

“Engle delivers a singular and spectral version of R&B, laced with the sparseness of Young Marble Giants with catharsis and yearning bursting from every note of her immaculate vocals.” – The Fader

“Over nimbly plucked guitar and jazzy horns, her rich voice sounds like pulling over an old knit sweater as she sings about watching the cyclical decay of animals and plants” – NYLON Magazine

XO SKELETON is the supple, steady, uncanny new album by La Force: a mixture of haunted pop and hot-blooded R&B that glistens at the meeting-point between life, death and love. “In dreams, the dead and living are the same,” Ariel Engle sings on “october,” her voice shimmering. “Maybe that’s why I’m better in the dark.”

The finality of death? The protection that another person’s love can or cannot bestow? These are body questions, matters of breath and flesh and pulse, which is the stuff at the centre of all of La Force’s music—beginning on her 2018 debut and also outward, into Engle’s electrifying work with Broken Social Scene, Big Red Machine, Efrim Menuck, Safia Nolin, and AroarA, her duo with her husband, Andrew Whiteman. La Force’s voice is stunning—somehow luscious and also wise—but so is her point of view—steady, sensitive, physical.

Engle made the album at home, in the house where she grew up, where she got married, where her father died—a place that’s “both completely dead and completely alive,” she says: a structure at the threshold of her inner and outer worlds. Off and on for two whole years, Engle’s old friend, co-producer Warren Spicer (Plants and Animals), would work in her basement until lunch, allowing songs to unfold at heartbeat pace. She’s been “unhealthily obsessed” with death, she says, since she was a child, and XO SKELETON is a kind of reckoning: a coming-to-terms with the oblivion that bookends a life, but also the “gooey centre” of love, loss, touch, and memory.

These nine extraordinary songs are human-scale and intimate, with chord changes like the shifting of limbs. “october”, brings us right inside the protective cloak of kisses (or “XO SKELETON”) cast by love and memory; at the same time, it explores the spookiness of that space, the movement of invisible spirits, like a saxophone rippling through a hall of mirrors. Other tracks were informed by Engle’s participation in “Song A Day,” a COVID-era invitation-only songwriters’ circle, where La Force worked alongside musicians like Leslie Feist, Maggie Rogers, Beck, and Big Thief’s Buck Meek.

Throughout, XO SKELETON is electric + vivid, and also tactile + grimy. It bends and turns with its every shift of pulse—35 mournful minutes; but also searching, turned on. Like a body, you might say. Or the memory of one.