Mercy Oceans

Video of the Week: Pantaleimon - "We Love"

Andria Degens has outdone herself in song and film.

The beauty—captured within music and celluloid—transforms "We Love" into an mini epic. Rarely does music with this much heartfelt passion make such a delicate, yet unforgettable impression.

As for the video, it's a classic. Shot to look as if the passing scenes are trapped in a dream or memory, the video for "We Love" becomes a part of you. Every person has sat around and dreamed of lover—-old and new; they've reminisced about the innocent, care-free times. Our brain creates a love letter that just can't be captured on film, but "We Love" is as close as film has ever gotten and it's in a three-and-a-half minute music video.

– Electronic Voice Phenomenon

Accompanied mostly by the hypnotic strummed and plucked sounds of her Appalachian dulcimer, and by occasional guests including Keith Wood of Hush Arbors, Baby Dee and ambient airliner cabin sounds, Andria Degens' second album is an intimate close-up glance into multitracked vocal fragility. Deliberately paced, the songs on ‘Mercy Oceans’ sometimes sound as if they are being sung for the first time, for the listener alone.
'High Star' shimmers brightly, with Degens' slow vibrato intertwining magically with Isobel Campbell's cello amid a trembling drone, the same harmonic tone which gives 'Born Into You' and 'Raw Heart' the timeless stamp of gently passionate love songs which are simultaneously private and shared willingly with the outside world.
Drifting in the immersive world of Pantaleimon can be disconcerting though. When the album finishes and workaday normality returns, it somehow seems so much more appealing to play the record over instead, and be stolen away once more.

Richard Fontenoy, Plan B January 2008

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