Winter Family Winter Family
Slowly changing church-organ chords, the soft and lush plunks of a piano, poems in English […]
Slowly changing church-organ chords, the soft and lush plunks of a piano, poems in English and Hebrew: There’s not much to Winter Family’s eponymous album, which ought to be its charm. But instead, the pieces on this debut-inexplicably a two-CD set-stumble under the weight of their own gloomy pretensions. In a Gothic (architectural, rather than subcultural) manner, the duo of Israeli poet Ruth Rosenthal and French keyboardist Xavier Klaine build imposing arches from their minimal complement. But Rosenthal’s delivery is too standard-issue breathy, Klaine’s minimalist spelunking too predictable to get past, no matter what the content of the spoken words.