AEM044 Lady Lamb the Beekeeper

There’s a line in a Boy With­out God song that goes “And if you play an instru­ment, I’m prob­a­bly a lit­tle bit in love with you.” I’m not sure whether there’s some sort of chip that they put in pubes­cent males when we’re not look­ing, but it’s almost uni­ver­sally accepted as fact by most young men of qual­ity and stand­ing that if you can play three chords on your older brother’s beat up acoustic, we like you. A lot. The best per­form­ers have a way of cre­at­ing a bridge between stage and audi­ence that makes every lis­tener in the room think that he or she (and only he or she) is being sung to, and that each song was writ­ten explic­ity for his or her ears. This is the pin­na­cle of the cof­fee­house expe­ri­ence, and it’s some­thing that gen­er­ally only tran­spires in doc­u­men­taries about Green­wich Vil­lage in the 60s. And yet, I get the same feel­ing when Lady Lamb the Bee­keeper pops up on iTunes.

Lady Lamb the Bee­keeper (Aly Spal­tro) is one of those rare indi­vid­u­als for whom musi­cal expres­sion is so nat­ural, so inher­ently part of her being, that she’s able to pro­duce truly mov­ing art with a grace sel­dom seen at her age (or any age, for that mat­ter). When her plans to travel to Guata­mala between high school and col­lege fell through and she was sud­denly faced with a year of aim­less­ness, Spal­tro made a con­scious deci­sion to begin mak­ing music. Under most nor­mal cir­cum­stances, this seems like a log­i­cal step, but I neglected to men­tion that prior to mak­ing this deci­sion Spal­tro had no musi­cal expe­ri­ence. So, she began to assem­ble her arse­nal, begin­ning not with instru­ments, but with the means by which to cap­ture her (at this point imag­i­nary) songs–an 8 track tape recorder. That’s right, she bought the record­ing equip­ment first. Now that’s commitment.

But she had a clear and sim­ple con­cept in mind: she wanted to layer instru­ments, to cre­ate songs with an empha­sis on sonic tex­ture. When most musi­cians say some­thing like this, their music ends up sound­ing like an Ani­mal Col­lec­tive b-side, or some equally soupy col­lage of over­lap­ping sam­ples, but not so with Spal­tro. Her songs have their ori­gins in folk music and the more del­i­cate side of mod­ern indie pop. A cer­tain inno­cence per­vades them that’s maybe bet­ter described as conviction–there’s no sense that she’s “try­ing” to accom­plish any­thing in par­tic­u­lar, but rather cre­at­ing exactly the songs that she needs to cre­ate in exactly the way that she needs to cre­ate them. There’s lit­tle to no artis­tic pre­ten­sion in her music, just a quarter-inch cable from her brain to your stereo.

Spal­tro imme­di­ately dove into her new­found pas­sion, record­ing two solo demos in two months while simul­ta­ne­ously learn­ing each instru­ment needed to tran­fer her men­tal sound­scape to tape. Heads up, this next part sounds a bit like the begin­ning of some rock and roll fairy tale (and let’s hope it is). She left 9 copies of her demo in a brown paper case on the counter of Bull Moose music in Brunswick, ME. 8 of these dis­ap­peared, their cap­tors abscond­ing into the ether never to be heard from again; 1 went to TJ Met­calfe, who teamed up with Spal­tro and became Lady Lamb the Beekeeper’s all-purpose instru­men­tal accom­pa­ni­ment. Together they recorded a num­ber of new tracks, and culling the best of Spaltro’s early demos, a third album came into being: For Hand­some Ani­mals. Now avail­able in a paper case at a record store near you! Or, you know, on iTunes.

The two songs on Lady Lamb the Beekeper’s Ampeater 7-inch strad­dle the full length of her bud­ding career. Side A “Almond Col­ored Sheets” is her most recently recorded track, sched­uled to see a lim­ited CD release on an upcom­ing album of demos and rar­i­ties. Built on the tri­fecta of banjo, organ, and vocals, “Almond Col­ored Sheets” is noth­ing short of spec­tac­u­lar. I chalked up a dou­ble digit play count within an hour of this tune hit­ting my inbox. It opens with the poignantly redemp­tive, “I was run­ning through a bad dream, but now I can make it out,” which sit­u­ates the tune in what­ever emo­tional state wavers between lucid dream­ing, child­hood nos­tal­gia, and gen­uine long­ing. It’s as though Spal­tro cast a net and cap­tured those lit­tle thoughts that dart in and out of your head when you space out on long bus rides.

This tune has all the hooks, well, all the good ones any­ways. The banjo pro­vides a solid per­cus­sive base while the organ serves up a sooth­ing har­monic drone and some bril­liantly placed melodic fig­ures. This foun­da­tion frees Spaltro’s voice to be opti­mally expres­sive as the song builds towards an inevitable cli­max. I like to think of Spal­tro as a musi­cal sponge, absorb­ing sounds for the first eigh­teen years of her life, just know­ing that when she reached the appro­pri­ate sat­u­ra­tion point she’d put all that stored knowl­edge to good use. She doesn’t dis­ap­point. At about 2:24 in, there’s a dra­matic break in the instru­men­ta­tion as she fin­ishes the verse, “I slipped out of the shower to dis­cover that his mother had taken my towel, so I had to resort to using your old kinder­garten t-shirt.” If hear­ing Spal­tro sing the words “your old kinder­garten t-shirt” doesn’t instantly recall some long lost flake of mem­ory, please seek med­ical atten­tion, as you’re offi­cially immune to music.

Side B “Dinosaur Song” is one of Spaltro’s first com­plete record­ings, com­pleted dur­ing a time in which she was eager to put her thoughts down on tape even as she was still learn­ing the rudi­ments of each instru­ment. The whole tune was writ­ten and recorded in less than an hour, and each part was com­pleted in one take. Maybe it’s just Christ­mas breath­ing down my neck, but with its haunt­ing vocal open­ing and sparse gui­tar, I feel like “Dinosaur Song” could be a bonus track on the Edward Scis­sorhands sound­track. Like Jeff Mangum’s record­ings as Neu­tral Milk Hotel, Lady Lamb the Beekeeper’s songs are minia­ture worlds in and of them­selves; to lis­ten is to step inside some­thing truly spe­cial, so take your coat off and stay a while. She sings,

I want to fly my soul like a kite,
want to see you walk through that door­way
and into this room where i am wait­ing for you
you like the sea
and how the sea began with a drop of sweat
soaked into a cloud swiped across the brow of god
and how he rung it out into sharp teeth to scales
and how the car­ni­vore was born

Lis­ten­ing to this song is like read­ing Catullus’s love poems in alter­nat­ing lines with Bullfinch’s Mythology–I’m not sure whether I’m hear­ing love poetry or leg­end, but either way I like it. The record­ing can get a bit rough at points, but there’s great­ness here. If those 8 mys­tery own­ers of the orig­i­nal demo had really lis­tened to the music, if they’d fully stepped into the world of Lady Lamb the Bee­keeper, they’d have kept the disc in a safe deposit box–who knows, it might pay for their retire­ment some day.

OK, maybe that’s a lit­tle hyper­bolic, but there are big things on the hori­zon for Lady Lamb the Beekeper. On the heels of her Maine “world” tour (she hit only towns in her home state that share names with coun­tries) this past sum­mer, she began work­ing with pro­ducer Alias to cre­ate some­thing with a bit more sheen than her self-recorded demos. Truth be told, Spal­tro could sing into a tran­sis­ter radio and I’d still buy the record. Hav­ing said that, I can’t wait to see her bust out a full band stu­dio album–wonderful, mag­i­cal things will hap­pen. When I hear these songs, I hear St. Vin­cent, Karen O, and Feist; but some­how I get the feel­ing that the day is fast approach­ing when St. Vin­cent, Karen O, and Feist will get to hear Lady Lamb the Beekeeper.

Ben Heller

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