"Stop Suffering is the new EP from Tropic of Cancer. It's the first music to emerge from Camella Lobo's project since the 2013 debut album, Restless Idylls, and features three new songs - 'Stop Suffering', 'I Woke Up And The Storm Was Over' and 'When The Dog Bites' - written and recorded by Lobo in LA, with additional production and mixing from Joshua Eustis (Sons of Magdalene, Telefon Tel Aviv). Lobo's deeply romantic, fatalistic music has always luxuriated in sadness, and that isn't about to change; but unlike TOC music of old, these new songs feel less about surrender: even if the title track does seem to address the S-M dynamic at the heart of any high-stakes relationship. This is not a record about loss, but about what comes after. Gone, or at least receding, is that decadent, fin-de-siècle preoccupation with decay, with the end. Stop Suffering is a new beginning. The towering, time-stopping title track is the culmination of Tropic of Cancer's work to date, at once intimate and immense. Eustis's bravura mixing wrings spine-melting effect out of each component, and the dubwise harnessing of space and bass pressure first showcased on Restless Idylls is now a defining feature of the band. The hypnotic, monochord intensity that characterised TOC's previous records gives way here to a more concrete song-narrative - which serves only to heighten the sensation of drowned-world psychedelia. Her divine alto still swims in reverb, but the words are clearer, there's a resolve to communicate through the aqueous haze. 'I Woke Up And The Storm Was Over', which appears here in a different mix to that which opens the US-only BEB comp I Can't Give You The Life You Want, is no less mesmerising, further highlighting Lobo's ever more sophisticated, painterly use of synth textures, and her plangent, otherworldly guitar work. The EP concludes with the elegiac, frozen-space ambience of 'When The Dog Bites'; Lobo's vocal is a radiant blur, consoling across a void of lonesome string-pads, vaporous noise and distant, tranquilized bass-drum detonations. "I've searched all the world," Lobo sings on 'I Woke Up...', "And it turns out I want all the world." With Tropic of Cancer it always comes back to longing: for the impossible, the irretrievable, the unrequitable.
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