Hearts of Animals

Even in a city whose musical denizens have a well-documented propensity for band-hopping, Mlee Marie Suprean is an especially prolific co-conspirator. Her shimmering and coyly pretty voice, elegantly phrased guitar work and slightly skewed pop sensibility can be found in no fewer than four consistent projects, with frequent cameos in others. While Suprean's efforts are well realized in each of her many musical incarnations, Hearts of Animals is where she truly shines. There's room for a little bit of everything in HOA, yet the music never feels like a kitchen-sink contrivance. Superb songcraft and a delicate touch allow Suprean to create music that is at once astonishingly heavy and gossamer-light; under her spell, seemingly disparate concepts and styles play nicely with one another. Dense noise provides the perfect foil for power-pop sugar; cheaply effective Casio beats underscore stabbing waves of pseudo-shoegaze psychedelia. This is musical magical realism to turn Gabriel García Márquez green-eyed with envy. - Nicholas Hall - Houston Press

The songs she sings evoke a loneliness and weariness earned through experience: bright poppy melodies that ring of hope and beauty with an undercurrent of sadness. If pop music is intended to be trite and disposable, in the hands of Mlee Suprean’s Hearts of Animals pop becomes something more – through her lyrics, sense of melody, and rich textures – it becomes literary. - Ramon Medina - Free Press Houston

Best CD-EP Lemming Baby - Hearts Of Animals
Best "New" Thing to Have Risen From the Bayou: Mlee Suprean
Mlee Suprean Hearts of Animals had everyone buzzing like bees. Yet, while Hearts of Animals received a lot of well deserved print this year, one great thing about Mlee is that she is so prolific so if you only heard Hearts of Animals, you missed out on a lot including her acoustic Mlee Marie which is itself genius. Whether it's her solo projects or her with Amye McCarthur's Wols or Mark Richardson's Oculous Sinister, Mlee was simply the musical King Midas of 2007. - Free Press Houston

Quite the find here, a natural bridge between straightforward indie pop traditions and some more daring territory, where I thought Tickley Feather might be headed. I’m much more fond of this Mlee Marie’s work when it’s abstract and loaded with delay, skronking horns, and a psychedelic/free mindset at play. And luckily, two of the four tracks here fit that description; opener “Stars Say No” being the hit, and the most far-reaching track here, and the repetitive gait of “Stop Talking” a mincing, relentless blast of blue sunshine. Truth be told, the pop songs are good too...Very excited to hear more of what she’s doing. Good one. 300 copies. - Doug Mosurock - Dusted Magazine

We're not entirely convinced that Mlee Marie didn't just get dropped off by some well meaning spirit in the sky, complete with a back-story, back-catalog and pointy auburn guitar. A year ago, we didn't know her from Eve, today, we can't turn around without stumbling upon some new project she's involved with. But this was the song that got it started for us – simple, sweet, coy; freight trains and hearts you really believe are broken. Yes, it's true, we made a Doctor and the Medics reference. - The Skyline Blog

Mlee Suprean writes great pop songs...They are great songs because they sound cute at first (but not to a fault), and then they get under your skin and you realize they've got a lot of substance. Not surprisingly, so does the lady who writes them. - 002 Magazine

With Hearts of Animals, singer/songwriter Mlee Marie Suprean has managed to create something very cool and unique, at least within our insular little Houston scene. I mean, we've got a metric ton of folkies with guitars, enough to re-populate Lilith Fair several times over, but Suprean's thrown the whole idea on its head by incorporating huge-ass washes of distortion, weird electronic beats, and electronic vocal effects, and the result is pretty impressive. To me, at least, the sound brings to mind vintage dreampop, particularly My Bloody Valentine and the Jesus & Mary Chain, but with Suprean's quirky, Eisley-esque vocals floating over the top. - Space City Rock

Mlee Suprean (aka Hearts of Animals) creates a perfect mix of lush starry-eyed dream pop and stuttered homegrown electronics. The wistful vocals and Casio click of "Stars Say No" burrow under your skin until they become the perfect daydream soundtrack; delightfully sweet but deceptively dense at the same time. Her swirling take on shoegaze is just perfect for the cool green shades of the upcoming Spring, turn this one up and enjoy the breeze. - Insound Records Newsletter

Fans of lush, ethereal shoegaze or lo-fi DIY indie-pop would be well advised to check out local one-woman band Hearts of Animals. The lone member, who enigmatically refers to herself as “SWF,” distills the lush, blissed-out waves of the endlessly layered instrumentation and hypnotic drones of My Bloody Valentine’s opus Loveless into arrangements consisting of little more than vocals, a single guitar and simple Casio-driven rhythms. She then coats the nectar-sweet melodies with a thick layer of Jesus and Mary Chain fuzz as her haunting, reverberated voice cuts through the mix like an eagle breaking through a cloud bank. - Houston Press