Arc Iris - Moon Saloon, review: ‘gorgeous hooks’

Jocie Adams is a modern renaissance woman.

Formerly a NASA researcher, classical composer and singer with Americana darlings The Low Anthem, she now improbably combines these disparate energies in Arc Iris (along with drummer Ray Belli, pianist Zach Tenorio-Miller and a host of violinist, bassoonists, thereminists etc).

The band’s second album — produced by David Wrench of Jamie xx and FKA Twigs fame — moves in any number of directions at once. A reverb-drenched torch song such as Kaleidoscope is liable to shapeshift into Joanna Newsom-esque chamber pop and onwards into a distended electronic jam (“What is reality? Not this place I see”).

On Johnny, she fingersnaps like Laura Nyro on Broadway; on Moon Saloon, she foregrounds her crystalline voice with the barest string arrangments.