Roquelin Sustained Notes

(…) That CD, Neverending Sundown, recorded with engineer Bill Korecky at Cleveland’s respected Mars Recording, comes out this week.

For anyone who has followed the band over the last decade, through two more homemade releases, 1999’s Further and its self-titled 2003 EP, Neverending Sundown will sound both familiar and brand-new.
It features vocalist Lili Roquelin, with Barringer moving to drums.

The band has retained its heavy base topped by smooth melodies, but now the chugging metallic chords are countered by Roquelin’s sustained notes that tumble over the instrumental base like a lava flow.
Though some might initially be reminded of a band like Evanescence, the music’s tougher as are Roquelin’s vocals which, for all their high-pitched clarity, have a focused, hard-edged quality and no distracted Goth dreaminess.

(…). They stumbled on Roquelin, who moved to the U.S. from France three years ago specifically to pursue music. They’re just about given up on finding a singer, and Barringer was getting ready to record the vocals again.
“Then her ad appears, and I called her,” he recalls. She lived two blocks from my house. She came over within half an hour. We gave her the same instrumental we gave everyone else. She took it and blew us away. What she wrote for the song, the lyrics were amazing, and the melodies were in place. It made your hair stand up. “The words she chooses, they’re English words, but they’re words most of us wouldn’t choose,” he continues. “She glows to me. She became the star of the movie.

By Anastasia Pantsios, Cleveland Free Times
February 2006