Mary Lattimore - Goodbye, Hotel Arkada

2023

Mary Lattimore's gorgeous harp-based instrumentals are easy to enjoy casually as gentle atmospheres floating through the air, but she rewards deep listening more than ever before on her densely arranged and quietly complex solo album Goodbye, Hotel Arkada. The record follows her 2020 effort Silver Ladders, an album made in collaboration with Slowdive's Neil Halstead that hovered in a state of thoughtful contemplation. While Silver Ladders found Lattimore expanding her toolbox of sounds to include deep bass tones, synth pads, and guitar textures, the six compositions that make up Goodbye, Hotel Arkada go even further, bringing in unique combinations of collaborators to certain songs for a broader spectrum of sounds and moods. On the slow-moving and haunted "Blender in a Blender," Lattimore duets with experimental guitarist Roy Montgomery, creating a chilly ice storm of high-register harp plucks and menacing guitar drones. After a false ending, the song's melody comes back twice as powerful, coated in distortion and sounding like a demonic symphony.

Lattimore also explores the shadows on "Arrivederci," a song featuring the Cure's Lol Tolhurst. Perhaps knowingly, the tune's web of interlaced melodies played on different synths and stringed instruments mimics the depressive beauty the Cure embodied so perfectly on their best-loved work. Lattimore gets into territory that's new for her with the percussive rhythmic components of "Horses, Glossy on the Hill" and stretches out in lazy, Twin Peaks-ian dreaminess with the warped electric guitars and floating synth clouds of "Music for Applying Shimmering Eye Shadow." The album is bookended by two of Lattimore's most triumphant statements to date, opening track "And Then He Wrapped His Wings Around Me" and the dynamic and glittery closing piece "Yesterday's Parties." Both are rare Lattimore compositions featuring vocals, with Meg Baird adding soft coos to "And Then He Wrapped His Wings Around Me" and reverb-doused vocal harmonies from Slowdive's Rachel Goswell liquefying with Samara Lubelski's violin on "Yesterday's Parties" to bring the song to a Cocteau Twins level of otherworldly bliss. Goodbye, Hotel Arkada is easily Lattimore's most richly nuanced work yet, exploring the contrasts of heavenly relief and hellish worry without defaulting to overstatement or clichéd sounds. It's ambient music at its absolute best, providing a space that the listener can be enveloped in completely just as easily as they can drift away from it without noticing.

Fred Thomas