Mazzy Star – Still: The Review

A laconic four-track dispatch from far across the spacetime continuum: That, in a nutshell, is Still. Three of the four songs are “new,” though two date to years long ago – i.e., 2000, when the band debuted seven new songs while on tour. For reasons known only to them, they failed to follow-up the live sets with a studio offering.

The opener, “Quiet, The Winter Harbor,” is one of those older songs. It features a melancholic piano motif and (typically) mesmerizing Hope Sandoval vocal, with the lyrics seemingly about being lost in the ocean of life: “Save me/‘cause I’m still sinking/and you got a harbor close to shore.” A guitar eventually wafts in, and the melody pushes forth and pulls back like the tide at dusk.

The second track, “That Way Again,” also dates to 2000. It’s primarily an acoustic-driven number, and is another hypnotic gem. The title track, then, is the only truly new song. It’s short, essentially a tone poem about love slipping away: “Your eyes are warm still/but inside you’ve just escaped.”

The final track is another older tune, this time a reworking of the title song of Mazzy Star’s classic 1993 opus So Tonight That I Might See. It hews close to the original with its spacey vibe, pulsating like a variable star…or a lost Velvet Underground track. Either way, it’s a guaranteed contact high. It, like the EP as a whole, is potent stuff.