Matthew Johnson reviews Long Way From Home for Re:Gen Magazine, 11/29/2007

On their third album, Lovespirals shift away from overt electronica in favor of beautiful, understated folk and blues ballads.

If sophomore album Free and Easy saw Lovespirals’ sound at its biggest, Long Way from Home is the duo’s most intimate, forsaking house beats and jazz flourishes for understated slide guitar and acoustic strums. Ryan Lum’s production is more mature than ever before; unless you really listen for it, you won’t be able to tell that he plays and records all the instruments himself – maybe not even then – and the drums sound warm and clear, betraying no hint of sampler or sequencer. Instead, Lum lets his arrangements take center stage, with emotive guitar solos harmonizing with electric organ on the bluesy ballad “Once in a Blue Moon” and relaxed acoustic strums highlighting jazzy piano chords on “Nocturnal Daze.” Anji Bee’s vocals are beautifully languid, the sweetness swathed in melancholy on the plaintive “Caught in the Groove,” adorned by floating background harmonies on “Treading the Water,” and sensual yet dreary on the pair’s stark rendition of classic spiritual “Motherless Child.” Fans of the pair’s more overtly romantic material will appreciate unabashed love song “This Truth,” and there’s even a hint of the ethereal dreaminess of Lum’s previous project, Love Spirals Downwards, on the fuzzy overlapping guitar tones and meandering vocals of “Sundrenched” and “Lazy Love Days.” It’s not an understatement to call Long Way from Home the duo’s most accomplished work up to date; as enjoyable as their previous explorations of laidback electronica and jazz fusion have been, this album captures Lum and Bee’s warm musical chemistry in a way that previous releases only hinted at.

View the original review at Re:Gen Magazine.

Ned Raggett reviews Long Way From Home for the All Music Guide

For their third album as Lovespirals, Anji Bee and Ryan Lum again create a lush series of songs that synthesizes disparate influences into a warm, enveloping listen. For all that the duo’s roots have been seen as being goth, their previous albums touched on a variety of approaches with aplomb, and at this point it’s just as accurate — and ultimately limiting — to say that Long Way From Home is blues, or country, or rock and roll. It’s a blend that has a low-key presentation, an easygoing pace, and an ear for all kinds of unexpected details that change the feeling of a song in an instant without disrupting it. The traditional standard “Motherless Child,” where the album title comes from, shows this clearly, where the harrowing lament of the lyric becomes a cool flow, Bee’s vocals paying homage to famous interpreters of the song like Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holliday without trying to actually replicate them. Meantime, a song like “Caught in the Groove” has a gentle, echoed percussion flow that sounds like late eighties Cocteau Twins, twangy guitars and piano that suggests majestic early seventies country, and Bee’s coolly sweet vocals calling to mind crooners from an even earlier time. This resplendent variety, which defines the sound of much of the album, helps the band further cement its own protean sound, increasingly recognizable on its own merits rather than just being the sum of its many parts. Some individual moments feel very thrilling — the wheezing guitar/harmonica background to “Treading the Water,” the sudden low-key funk on “Lovelight” — without overwhelming the overall flow, a fine balancing act.

View the original post on the All Music Guide

Cadence Revolution reviews Long Way From Home, 10/27/2007

It’s very rare these days to come across an entire CD which you will listen to over and over from beginning to the end non-stop, and even rarer to find one which makes you want to grab everyone you know and tell them “you must listen to this.”

However such is the case with the third release, Long Way Home, from the California-based duo Lovespirals, consisting of Anji Bee on vocals and Ryan Lum on instruments.

Fusing sounds from jazz, chill, folk, Americana and even a touch of country, this latest release will grab you and wrap you in an aural blanket of warm with a soothing hand on the brow that shows off why the indie music scene is our salvation from the commercial corporate music machine, and Lovespirals is one of it’s shinning stars.

From the opening jazzy/country sound of the aptly named “Caught In The Groove”, to the groovy feel of “This Truth”, to the lazy summer afternoon feeling of “Sundrenched” this CD is a wonderful blend of vocals and music coming together in an intertwining dance of harmony deftly expressing emotions in both delivery and composition.

Perhaps the one track that shows off their ability to combine emotion with production is the track “Motherless Child”, which had been released as a remix by MoShang on his Asian Variations CD earlier this year. On the Long Way Home version, Lovespirals have gone with a less-is-more approach and stripped the song down to the barest and starkest in this presentation.

Anji’s emotion-filled delivery holds nothing back in delivering the full emotion of grief and loss. While Ryan’s haunting and simple layered guitar work echoes her delivery, but neither overpowers the other, and the two come together to powerfully capture the feeling of being alone and isolated.

Throughout Long Way Home, the duo convey a wide range of feelings and emotions as words and music come together or swirl around and through each other in a mesmerizing dance of audio.

Lovespirals have found the perfect balance, resulting in a release that never falters from one track to the next that is rare these days, and is the perfect aural vacation everyone should take at least once a day.

View the original post at Cadence Revolution