Still House Plants present their second LP FAST EDIT. Cultivated over the course of 2019, the album switches the combativeness of previous releases for bare intimacy.
FAST EDIT is a palette of qualities and curdled headspaces. Now living far apart and coming together only for intense periods of shows and touring, the band have come to rely on an archive of mp3s (quick recall overtakes stable long term memory). Written on mobile phones, dictaphones, and laptops, FAST EDIT cuts rehearsals and schemas with tight, raucous tracks. This is most tenderly at play on ‘Shy Song’ – a cut'n’chase piece, in which all sounds are ghosts of another. ‘PredikateD’ is a phone on the ground: the voice is air, the guitar and drums meld with the plywood and sand-bag structure, the seams exposed.
The taste of the record is captured in an intervention written for the cancelled 2020 edition of Glasgow’s Counterflows Festival by Frances Morgan:
‘How do you think we should do this? The song does something different now, puts the other foot forward. How do you know when it’s done? End on a verb and it becomes a command: run! Towards the next thing. Do – towards the next thing to be done.’
