So Tonight That I Might See

iTunes Review

Hope Sandoval’s voice and David Roback’s guitar were meant to be together. Drowsy, plaintive, and emotionally detached, Sandoval’s little-girl-lost style melds perfectly with Roback’s lush guitar, ranging across lilting acoustic figures to jagged, feedback-ridden psychedelia and back again. In So Tonight That I Might See, the second and best of their trio of early-90s albums, the pair achieves the fullest realization of their atmospheric sound, like the Cowboy Junkies’ twangy melancholy crossed with vintage Velvet Underground fuzz and drone. On first listen, the songs register less as individual compositions than as ambient impressions: passing shadows and light, seen through drawn curtains. The exception is “Fade Into You,” So Tonight’s surprisingly successful single, with its lovely, folkish melody, understated piano, and slide guitar passages that register like the aural equivalent of longing. The arrangements aren’t minimal, exactly, but no note or effect is wasted. A shimmery pipe organ washes over the opening notes of “Blue Light” in a kind of Percocet-induced gospel; “Wasted” works a disaffected version of the down-and-out 12-bar blues; and the title song is a hypnotic, 7-1/2-minute festival of VU-inspired squalling guitar and spoke-sung lyrics that dissolves in a wash of feedback.