REVIEW: Deradoorian—Ready For Heaven (2025)
Angel Angel, down we go together...
It must be simultaneously awesome and frustrating as hell running Fire Records, having all these world class acts on your roster, while selling the albums in the mid-thousands.
Over the years I’ve amassed albums on the label by the likes of Jane Weaver, Vanishing Twin, Death And Vanilla, Rats On Rafts, Hater, Hookworms, Virginia Wing, as well as great reissues from Spacemen 3, The Lemonheads, Neutral Milk Hotel, Pulp, The Groundhogs and no doubt countless others I’ve forgotten about/not got to yet.
Deradoorian is another of those artists that you listen to and are constantly stuck by how great they are, and…why don’t more people know her work? Even my more in the know music pals seem only vaguely aware of her (“oh wasn’t she in Dirty Projectors?” is the frequent response to my enthusiastic utterances about her new album. Yes. She was in Dirty Projectors. About 15 years ago—on the astonishing Bitte Orca and Mount Wittenberg Orca, the overlooked Bjork collaboration.
Since then, she’s worked with all sorts, but more importantly has released a bunch of great music, all of which follows a singular path and is all worth your while checking out. But if you want to just cut to the chase and get up to date, then Ready For Heaven is the kind of instantly accessible record that may well act as a gateway to work backwards to see what else you missed.
It all kicks off with the slinky Storm In My Brain, a figidity number that wouldn’t be out of place on an early 80s new wave album, with its spindly guitar lines, clicky percussion and groovemonster bassline channelling Bela Lugosi’s Dead. The head-bobbing rhythmic propulsion and mantra like lyrical delivery keeps on rolling on Any Other World, and already you’re in. If anything, by track 3, No No Yes Yes, it’s gone positively late 70s new wave disco. ESG would have killed for a song like this.
But the real masterpiece of the record resides next, on Digital Gravestone, the song that trailed the album in the winter of last year. There are few songs of recent times I’ve come back to as many times as this one, with its train track rhythm and faintly desperate sounding search for the “unborn son to save the day”. The best thing I can say about it is that if Bowie was still with us, you just know he would be raving about it. In fact, he would have probably offered to play sax on it.
But it’s by no means a front loaded album. Next up, the swooning Set Me Free somehow takes the end riff of I Will Survive and spins it out into a truly gorgeous ballad, overlaid with appropriately angelic harmonies to carry us along.
One track that might cause your partner to politely complain at what’s coming out of the speakers is Purgatory Of Consciousness. Frankly, the clue is in the title, but it kind of burbles along doomily like a set up for a particularly concerning arthouse movie scene. It’s only a brief blip in an otherwise top class record, concluding with the stern synth workout Reigning Down and the smooth wind down of Hell Island.
At 39 minutes long, it’s a classic example of the kind of record you want to start over the moment it has finished, and has barely been off the turntable since it arrived. Now, if only Angel Deradoorian could tour this mighty body of work somewhere in the vicinity of central Scotland, I think we would all be much happier as a result.
