I once read an essay that conjectured that the moments we feel most fully alive and present in the world are the moments in which we get closest to the impossible. For example, what if you turned around right now and Bill Murray was in your bedroom, staring at you, eating an apple? You would probably remember that moment for the rest of your life, and it would certainly put a thrill into the rest of your day, if not your week or month. Think of all the conversations you would have about it (“I have no idea how he got in! And then he just climbed out the window, never said a word!”), whereas if you turned around and found the pile of dirty clothes you left there yesterday, you wouldn’t even remember that moment ten minutes later. This idea has stuck with me since then (it’s not unlikely that I’ve mangled or misunderstood it in some way, but if so then it is now my idea) and it resonates with my experience of music as well as my experience of life. The music that always grips me in the most visceral and immediate way is the music that sounds impossible, that generates in me a feeling of joyful surprise. Sometimes it happens in straight-up pop music, if I hear a new three chord song that sounds so eternal and so unique I can’t believe it wasn’t already written decades ago, or an unconventional yet lovely chord progression or melody. More often it only lasts for a moment, a rhythmic hitch in the chorus of a song or one bar of sublime and strange harmony. These are the moments in pop songs I play back over and over again, but in other modes of composition, minus the familiar pop anchors, the feeling of being in wonderfully unfamiliar territory can last for far longer.

Bing and Ruth, the compositional outlet for Brooklyn-based pianist David Moore, manages to reach and sustain this feeling of the impossible impressively well. His lovely, winding pieces manage to achieve some of the same hypnotic and otherworldly qualities as electric and electronic music despite the fact that they are built almost entirely out of acoustic textures (my first, probably simplistic, reaction to hearing Bing and Ruth was to think “acoustic Stars of the Lid”). The key to the otherworldliness in Moore’s work is the combination of disparate instruments to form singular, unified sounds that seem entirely alien to the instruments we think we know so well. For example, there is a wash of sound in B-side “go on.” which sounds to me like clarinet, cello and bowed cymbals, but part of the beauty and the fun of the music is that it’s very hard to tell just by listening what is making the strange sounds that you are hearing.

Moore is also unafraid of allowing his music to unfold naturally and gradually, which accounts for the longer track times and the sense of luxurious pacing. Exploring for three minutes the sound of two clarinets slipping in and out of tune with one another with an aching slowness (as on the very start of “go on.”) is something that takes a bit of compositional bravery, but it more than pays off. As with much minimalism (this is, in fact, one of the points of Cage’s often mocked “4′33””, which causes the audience to listen not to silence but to the ambient and human sound in the concert hall), the simplicity and clarity of the ideas causes the audience to listen with an intense focus seldom given to music that dances and cavorts for attention. The sound of the accelerating and decelerating beats, generated by the two tones as they drift apart and then back together, is a fascinating and strange one, putting the focus not on the pitches of the two woodwinds but on the rhythms generated by their intonation differences (Beats are natural sound interference generated by two tones which are very close together but not quite in unison. They sound like a rhythmic swelling, almost like tremolo, the speed of which varies by how close the two tones are to one another). Around this locus, Moore gradually adds other instruments, culminating in the arrival of his piano, which plays a gentle, steady, three-chord pattern. Over this pattern there are fragments of lovely, melancholic piano melodies set against drones created by the intersection of bowed cymbals with bowed strings and analog synths with mellow clarinets, combining pitches and textures from different instruments into one sound that is unrecognizable and inimitable. The description may sound labored but the music is anything but. The effect is stunning, and it’s only enhanced by the moments when you hear a human voice or a cello emerge with a clarity that’s hauntingly brief. The way the song melts back into a single note at the very end (this time cello overtones and voice, I think) is a moment of delicate and perfect symmetry.

The A-side “Rails” drawn from the band’s forthcoming City Lake album, begins with some Reichian clapping, overlapping different claves like puzzle pieces and then matching them with a piano figure that neatly parallels their rhythms. Like the much sparser piano figure in “go on.”, this serves as an anchor for the rest of the song and a springboard for overlapping vocal, string and reed melodies, which sit just far enough back in the mix that you have to really focus to draw them out. They always seem to dance away from your ear, and just as soon as you catch on to one it disappears and you find yourself suddenly drawn to a different melody. Nothing ever seems to repeat, and the song has a lightness to it that would almost make it sound improvised if it weren’t so carefully woven together. It really ought to be said that the musicians who give life to Moore’s pieces are immensely skillful and subtle (for those keeping score, or trying to discern various instruments, the lineup is as follows: Becca Stevens, Voice; Jean Rohe, Voice; Jeremy Viner, Clarinet; Patrick Breiner, Clarinet; Greg Heffernan, Cello; Leigh Stuart, Cello; Jeff Ratner, Acoustic Bass; Chris Berry, Percussion; Myk Freedman, Lap Steel; and Mike Effenberger, Analog Synth). Everything is in its right place, and all the sounds blend effortlessly together. Without such tightly, expertly controlled performances, the pieces could never reach their deeply textured heights.

My favorite moment in “Rails,” one which gives the listener a thrilling weightless feeling, is right around 4:20, when the floor tom and bass that have been with us for minutes suddenly drop out and a thick, clustered chord, composed of nearly every instrument in the band, swells and swells as if to burst. It’s a fantastically tense moment, and when the bass and drum come back in it’s with the same subtle part, understated as everything else in Moore’s music, yet in context, buoying up that thick cloud of sound, it feels absolutely triumphant, like the biggest sound in the world.

Gabe Birnbaum

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Inserting moments of musical unrest into pop music without disturbing the graceful flow that makes pop songs so pleasurable is an incredibly difficult task. Even brief moments of dissonance can be distracting (occasionally one gets the feeling that they are intentional distractions from poor songwriting) or come off as forced, an insincere attempt to make a band sound more interesting or difficult than they really are.  It requires a remarkably gentle touch to make dissonances and rhythmic quirks not only slip by without disrupting the song, but actually lock in and sound as if they are essential and natural, and this is, in fact, just the thing Tavo Carbone of Brooklyn’s Horse’s Mouth excels at.

Carbone’s songs are short and restless, full of small idiosyncrasies and twitches (beats added or missing, lush vocal harmonies appearing and disappearing just as fast, tempos that lurch and accelerate).  You may feel like you’ve had your fill of idiosyncratic Brooklyn rock bands (lord knows I get that feeling sometimes), but the members of Horse’s Mouth are probably not quite what you are picturing after that description.  There is nothing irritatingly or safely cool about them.  Horse’s Mouth is actually refreshingly and genuinely nerdy.  In live videos, they are mostly clad in white t-shirts and jeans and Carbone himself sports an unassuming Monkees-style bowl cut, opening his mouth cartoonishly wide and bowing his head to hit the lowest notes.  After all, the band draws as much influence from showtunes (bear with me) and classical music as they do from the staples of indie pop.  Their Ampeater B-side “Thin Branches Against a Window” actually ends with a loop from a familiar-sounding orchestral piece.

A Brooklyn native, Carbone met his bandmates, drummer J.J. Beck, bassist Matt Scott, violinist Heather Sommerlad, and multi-instrumentalist Michael Chinworth, at Bennington College, a school in Vermont that has produced other Ampeater favorites like Trevor Wilson (AEM022) and Will Stratton (AEM70).  Carbone actually has quite a lot in common with Wilson, from his tightly coiled vibrato and theatrical delivery to his compositional and conceptual ambition.  The members of Horse’s Mouth have been playing Carbone’s songs together in various forms and with various other musicians since 2005 (including, at one point, a 17 piece orchestra), though Horse’s Mouth as a band only officially dates back to 2008.  You can hear the chemistry between the musicians almost immediately upon listening, and especially on watching some of the live footage shot by Connor Kammerer and Pixelhorse. The live performances are impressively faithful to the record without losing any of the feeling of fun and spontaneity that comes from the itchy arrangements.

A-side “In the Woods” (both songs in today’s single are drawn from the band’s new album Sophia, which will be released later this month in CD and DVD form, the latter featuring original films made by 12 videographers, one for each song) opens with a sprightly picking figure on the electric and a drumbeat that matches the guitar’s rhythmic accents precisely.  The verses each close with a lovely, harmonized “not old enough to know”, on the last word of which the vocals begin in a tense minor 7^th before leaping up to catch and hang on a high falsetto harmony.  It’s one of those effortless little moments of dissonance that provide the tension and release in Carbone’s songs, rather than the usual gradual emotional crescendo thing, which is okay too, only significantly more expected.  Also notice the way the lovely spiraling violin figure that leads us into the instrumental verse is cast into bold by the drums brief disappearance, and the way the drums are called back by a handclap (the only one in the entire song).  The most unexpected moment of unease comes during the very last descending “know”, where instead of resolving to the root, Carbone’s vocal melody rolls down through perfect consonance before landing on the flat two, a half step up from the one of the final chord.  It’s probably the most dissonant note you can sing over a minor chord, and it has an intensely disquieting effect as the last note of the whole song, especially the way Carbone coats it with pretty vibrato, as if it’s the most beautiful note in the world.  Yet this is actually the very thing that sells it on the recording: it doesn’t sound like it’s an ugly note to him.  It sounds like the note that he wanted the song to end on.  On the album (which drops on March 20^th and which I haven’t heard in its entirety), each song is strung into the next, so perhaps this final tension is a way of moving into the next song.

B-side “Thin Branches Against a Window,” after a brief organ intro, again matches the rhythmic emphases of the guitar to the drum part, giving the song a lilting, dancy feel that unifies it with “In the Woods” somewhat, though this song is much more of an exercise in constant motion.  Before the first verse even starts, it careens off into a very brief sort of Deerhoof interlude, which pockmarks the song periodically, in which the tempo abruptly and completely changes and the drums play a couple of quick, skittering fills.  The song rarely stays in any one meter for more than a few bars, sticking mostly, but not entirely, to 4/4 during the verses and otherwise jumping around like a madman, a feeling that is countered only by the calm and stately violin parts.  After the one moment where everything coheres into what sounds as if it’s going to be an actual chorus (repeating melody and lyric, 4/4 time, descending harmony), the meter changes and the violin and guitar spin out of control, everything clashing and then somehow resolving into what sounds like a loop from a Schubert record, which finally plays itself out into three acoustic guitar arpeggios and…the sound of a bird chirping?  It’s an unbelievable amount of stuff crammed into less than three minutes, and when faced with it it’s easy to overlook the loveliness of the chiming guitars and glockenspiels that underscore the verses.

I’ve mentioned before how music that maintains its mystery is often far more effective, and Carbone does exactly that here, giving us lyrics oblique enough to mean a great many things and music that skates through so many moods and meters and feels that it’s hard to say just what exactly makes it feel coherent, though certainly something does.  Perhaps it’s the common sounds of each member’s voice (they all sing, excluding Beck, the drummer), or the distinctly personal style each has on his or her instrument.  Perhaps it’s that all Horse’s Mouth songs feel odd in precisely the same way, the product of Carbone’s unique and unified vision, impossible to pin down completely but evocative and pleasurably strange, like a fairytale landscape (not one of the neutered ones where everyone is nice and boring, but the Hans Christian Andersen kind, where little girls get their feet cut off with axes).

Gabe Birnbaum

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Will Stratton is poised at a moment of spiritual and artistic growth, and lucky for us he is committing it to tape (or hard drive, rather). His first two records, 2007’s What the Night Said and 2009’s No Wonder, were received warmly by fans of beautiful acoustic pop songs with spiderweb-delicate fingerpicking and hushed, intimate vocals. For them he garnered innumerable Nick Drake comparisons and honest, thoughtful praise from many corners of the media. Coke Machine Glow called No Wonder “a lovely, humble, mature record from a person who seems like a lovely, humble, mature human being,” and this is exactly how it feels to listen to it. Mature and humble are hardly the attributes that get the blog hormones flowing these days, but in some ways we are reaping the benefits of the fact that Stratton hasn’t completely blown up in the hyperbolic, slavering world of blog music journalism. No Wonder was a perfectly lovely album that could have been replicated for an entire career (see Damien Jurado, for example). It is dramatic enough to be moving without coming anywhere close to gaudiness, simple and understated enough to seem completely uncontrived, intelligent enough to ring true in a way that surpasses platitudes, and warm enough that you get an immediate sense of the human heart behind the songs. The drama in it comes from delicate internal moments like walking home, alone and lovestruck, after a party, the way it often does in real life, at least for the kind of people who tend to listen to melancholic acoustic pop music that is heavy on the I-IV chord progressions and literate lyrics (I can be mildly snarky because I count myself squarely in this camp). Stratton could have had a lovely career working within those straight-forward song forms, but he has the searching and self-critical personality of an artist, rather than just a craftsman.

Stratton was very young when he recorded those two albums (he still is, really), and had he been launched into the slobbery jaws of even indie-stardom, we might not be seeing the kind of growth we can see in his new music, some of which he has kindly allowed Ampeater to convey to you, the people. The appeal of the delicate, melancholy, direct songs of his first two albums is strong, and it hasn’t been banished by any means, but here Stratton begins to mold it into something less predictable and more expansive. I’ll let him speak for himself because he is incredibly eloquent: “There is a single spiritual position that exists in songs like [Nick Drake's] “Which Will” that is so strong that, when you hear it, it seems like it becomes the only thing that exists in the world(…)That kind of music, written from a place of such isolation, has the illusion of clarity. Maybe it has real clarity, it’s hard for me to say. Either way, I’m tired of being in that place. I want to forge out on my own and wind up some place I don’t recognize. I want to learn to express very specific moments of anger, flirtatiousness, joy–all things that are more or less absent in Nick Drake’s music–with the same sort of gutwrenching precision that he used to express the false sense of omniscience that accompanies deep despair.”

After all that setup, you’re probably expecting some death metal or fifteen minute guitar solos or synthy 80’s pop. Well, there’s none of that, but improvisation does play a key role these songs in a way that it never has before. A-side “Bluebells” commences with an open piano-figure that recalls the beginning of Bon Iver’s “Babys”, but which is harmonically static and probably comes instead from interest in recent minimalist classical music (our conversation was educational for me in this arena, to say the least, but I recommend checking out John Luther Adams, David Lang, Arvo Part, & Gavin Bryars for starters). Over this piano drone, Stratton lays out a few minutes of warm, tumbling guitar, all of which was improvised. He has lately taken to using first takes, saying that “it keeps me thinking on my toes.” This interest in spontaneity is another bold move, directly in opposition to the precise and measured craft of his previous work, yet one which serves the song to the very same extent that Stratton’s simpler pop forms served his earlier work. Here it serves as both a counterweight to the minimal and gorgeous piano/vocals outro and as a kind of mood-setter, capturing an expansive, still feeling that isn’t easily conveyable through traditional songwriting. It’s something we haven’t heard from Stratton before, a sound that seems to call to mind wide open landscapes at dawn, the sun slowly infusing the crevices of rocks with its light.

It’s onto this landscape that Stratton projects his melancholy song, yet there’s something strangely dusty and distant about the sadness in “Bluebells”. The effects obscure his voice just enough to render it ghostly, almost like a voice from the past (you can just barely hear it hovering behind the guitar solos), and the song is narrated in the second person, making it about the listener rather than the singer. It’s a subtly alarming shift, putting us in the position of being hopelessly lost, rather than safely empathizing with a narrator who is hopelessly lost. The clashing guitars that rise up around the four minute mark, crackling and slashing one another like contentious bolts of lightning, infuse the song with a dissonance that, though it disappears quickly, enhances this air of desperation and sadness, especially when we’re lead out into a beautiful piano and vocal section only to hear the line “by now you must have been certain that it had all been a lie”. When the narrator tells us that we still kept searching for our lost love, it’s hard to tell whether it’s sweet or pathetic, and this ambiguity is crushingly sad. Are we deluded or determined? Both? Also to be noted, over the middle section with it’s minimal backbeat, when Stratton is singing “which way did my darling go?”, is the way the bass note on the guitar gradually bends up from the four chord to the five, introducing some dissonant intermediate notes and a sense of unease and muted violence that wouldn’t be present if he’d just played the chord progression straight.

B-side “The Hudson Line” is as close to Stratton’s earlier work as anything he sent us. His voice is stripped of the effects that mask it on “Bluebells” and left to cut clearly over the beautiful lattice of fingerpicked acoustic guitar. It is a love song, yet it’s not so much a declaration of love as an assessment of a love that has come and gone. The moments of sweetness are now tempered by the temporal distance, and the wistful mood is perfectly captured by the lines “all I know all I know all I know / is all greatness is born out of sin / but somehow I saw you”. The narrator’s relationship with the woman is something born out of sin, yet at the same time it seems to be the one thing that transcends this tautology. It’s a sweetness that is rendered all the sweeter by the darkness of the worldview in which it sits. The background against which these lyrics are set is appropriately lovely and delicate, yet it’s easy to miss just how amazing and skillful the rhythmic interplay is between the thumb and the rest of the hand. Stratton, though he’s no show off, is an incredibly agile and creative guitarist, with a sense of play that allows him to slip away from the expected patterns of folk and rock guitar. Aside from providing a harmonic backbone, the guitar here frequently subdivides the bar into uneven groups of threes, giving the song a rolling feeling mirrored in the lyrics about “galloping along the Hudson Line.”

These exclusive tracks represent the evocative songwriting Stratton is known for, only evolved to the next step. Thankfully for us listeners, he is a person who is constantly pushing himself forward, stretching for something just beyond his reach. We have the luxury of being able to sit back and immerse ourselves in the discoveries he makes along the way, the beautiful music that composes Will Stratton’s journey through the world. Stay tuned for another digital 7” in the coming weeks, as well as greater portions of the interview.

Gabe Birnbaum

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Here at Ampeater, we’re not ashamed to say that we love Canada. The bustling Toronto scene has been a neverending source of marvelous music for us to present triumphantly to the open-eared public: Evening Hymns, PS I Love You, The D’Urbervilles, and now Kat Burns, aka KASHKA.  Burns’ gorgeous voice and sharp songwriting skills (you try and slip the word “dendrophiliac” into a song without sounding like a jerk) help make the wonderful Forest City Lovers what they are, but occasionally, prolific as she is, she churns out some songs that don’t quite fit into the FCL template, and so she’s taken on the KASHKA alter-ego to begin releasing those songs, which swap the Lovers’ sunny summer acoustics for a subdued, wintry electronic sound, probably more appropriate for Toronto.

Burns describes KASHKA as “the outlet that many of my songs drift into when they feel like they may float away otherwise,” and you will instantly understand what she means.  Rather than the roots and leaves of FCL, KASHKA songs sound like streetlights refracted through icicles. They are wintertime compositions (both were literally written during the darkest evenings of winter), sonically filled out with chiming keyboards, tinkling bells, large spaces, and Burns’ lovely, pure voice, which, aside from carrying the melodies, functions as pretty much the best synthesizer ever, whether she’s creating warm choruses of chordal oohs, fuzzy lead lines between verses, or serenely floating contrapuntal melodies à la a string section.  The thing that carries over from the Lovers is Burns sense of precise and tasteful simplicity.  She knows in either case that her voice and knack for melody will carry the song, and intelligently refrains from throwing any kind of half-baked, overly adorned arrangements into the mix.  Her vocals are mixed to the front, so that they may lift the weight of the song, but they are not pushed as far forward as is common to most electro-pop and they don’t share the ridiculously melismatic neo-soul that tends to make you feel like someone spliced some vocals in from a recent American Idol audition.  In fact, it’s easy not to notice how wonderfully skillful a singer she is until you start realizing how many of the sounds that fill out the airy space of these songs are not keyboards but rather her voice.

Making electro-pop (making good electro-pop, rather) has a couple of inherent challenges, both of which KASHKA rises to effortlessly.  First, for your voice to slot nicely among all the pristine synth swells and gentle blips, it has to be as on pitch and tightly controlled as your SK-1. As you can hear in pretty much any moment of her Ampeater single, this is not a problem for Burns, whose voice is as agile as it is pretty, and somehow never cloying or tiring in the way of so many singers gifted with exceptional vocal cords (this quality probably owes a lot to her aforementioned intelligent restraint).  The second major challenge is that when you’re creating a music that essentially exists only in digital space, and never as a full set of live sounds in a room, it’s really easy to succumb to the temptation to layer the hell out of it (I know this because I pretty much always do so, no matter how pure my intentions are when I set out).  This is true of all recording done mostly by overdubs, but I think it’s a special difficulty with electronic music, which has no acoustic corollary, and in which it is easy to get excited about different synth sounds and just turn everything into consonant-sounding mud, which is one of my least favorite sounds (it is a term that is also applicable to jam bands).  KASHKA never has this problem.  Her music, with its softly muted beats and warm clouds of voices, is perfectly refined and alluring.  There’s not a hair out of place, and there are no screams for your attention, and this is precisely why it holds your ears so easily.

Despite the refinement and unflashiness I’ve been harping on, KASHKA doesn’t come across as sparse or stark because those words imply a kind of spiritual darkness that just isn’t there.  Though the songs are wintry, they are full of the warmth of huddling up by the fire after a long walk in the snowy evening, full of hope in the face of adversity.  The first lyric on A-side “Hands In” is, in fact, “put your hands in my heart tonight / just warm them there,” which is all about love as a balm for cold weather, cold weather being of course a shorthand for the larger cruelties of the world.  The song begins with a quick but relaxed three note keyboard pattern that manages to provide the entire harmony of the verse without ever playing a single chord.  The harmony is so simple that we don’t need any more for our ears to understand exactly where we are, and what’s brilliant about it is that we barely get any more:  another, far quieter, single-note line, some muted percussion.  Eventually some single-note guitar appears, along with some distant jangling bells, a light keyboard melody, and some tom fills that always seem to signal the arrival of hugeness, yet which always lead to nothing, not even a crash on the downbeat.  All these elements slowly and gradually coalesce to create the filled out song, and just at the moment when you hear this, it slips away, leaving only the echo of the bells (which are brilliantly buried in the mix so that you may not have even noticed them until this precise moment).  The only response is to listen to it again.

“Lonely Creatures” begins with an absence as well, withholding all the low end through the first verse to achieve that untethered, airy sound before eventually culminating in the busiest, thickest sound on the whole single, which is of course still rather delicate. My absolute favorite moment in the song only comes once (of course), and it’s right at 2:15, in the middle of the chorus, where Burns comes in with an ethereal ooh which is broken up into sixteenth notes in a way that echoes the rolling beats of the chorus and calls to mind images of rippling water.  But it’s hard to even pick a favorite moment in “Lonely Creatures.” All of the background vocal work is unbelievably beautiful, and so is the third repetition of the chorus line, when it slides up with the ease of warm breath rising into cold air.  The call for all the lonely city-dwellers to come together and create a spark of heat together is a perfect call-to-arms for someone concerned primarily with spreading love and warmth, and though it makes for a stark contrast with the “icy breasts of morning” and catalogues of inhibitions in the lyrics, what stays with you after listening is not the icy expanse of the backing track but the humanity and warmth of Burns’ voice, reminding us that, when faced with the harsh winters of the world, our greatest asset is the heat radiating from our bodies and the love radiating from our hearts.

P.S. If you were wondering how “Lonely Creatures” would sound if you accidentally played Gyorgy Ligeti’s “Atmospheres” over it, the answer is REALLY, REALLY AWESOME.

Gabe Birnbaum

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When you cast a look over her resume, it’s astonishing that Indiana-born songwriter Lisa Germano isn’t more well known: Session work with Bob Dylan and The Indigo Girls (?!); albums released on Capitol and 4AD to accolades in Rolling Stone and Spin; collaborations involving Johnny Marr, Phil Selway, Giant Sand, Calexico, among others; oceans of praise from Swan/Angel of Light Michael Gira, who has released her last few albums on his Young God imprint; stints accompanying pop legends like David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Sheryl Crow. She’s worked with more rock superstars than most people have had jobs, yet she still remains appealingly enigmatic and (this is a dangerous word to throw around in talking about artists, but still) childlike. There’s something about her music that manages to be completely open and simple and yet at the same time elusive and mysterious, much in the way of the wisdom of little children. Her music is not, thankfully, cloyingly cute like most of the other artists who happen to strike, intentionally or not, the childlike aesthetic.

Take, for example, her Ampeater B-side “The Prince of Plati,” drawn from her latest Young God release Magic Neighbor. The chord progressions are fairly simple, the vocals strong and at the fore in a style that calls to mind PJ Harvey and other un-wispy female singers, the lyrics direct and unambiguous in their plea to a lover for a little comfort and escape and play. The song is appealing in part because it doesn’t shy away from directness in search of some kind of untouchably cool ambiguity, something that is irritatingly common in younger songwriters. In fact, it’s so direct and intimate, it almost feels voyeuristic to listen to it, something that’s enhanced by lyrics like “oh, nobody lookin/oh nobody see.” The whole song stands, lyrically, as an attack on the narrator’s own jadedness and an embrace of transient joys. She wants to “do the things we did before we thought we knew,” to return to a time before her assumptions about what life is or isn’t robbed her of the freedom to step outside her tired routines. The mentions of storytelling and play, simplistic and well-worn metaphors (sadness = blue), really draw out the childlike core of the song, making it easy to understand why Gira has said that her music reminds him of “early Disney songs.”

The unadorned and subtle arrangement enhances the simplicity and innocence of the song perfectly. The chiming, upper register piano definitely brings the Disney thing back to mind, especially in the slightly off-kilter lydian melody that closes out the song. As any modern jazz musician knows, the sharp 11 is the magic note that makes everything sound floaty and ethereal. Like all the other arrangements on Magic Neighbor, it was mostly worked out on the spot, and you can hear this in listening. The bass and pedal steel parts are simple and they never step on the vocals, which remain right up front, inches from your ears, instead choosing to fill out the backdrop of the song with airy clouds of sound. Germano’s voice walks a fine line between the breathy vulnerability inherent to the lyrics and necessary to a song so intimate, and the strength that is obviously there to be tapped. Rather than giving us everything she has, she draws us in by holding back.

A-side “Reptile” works a similar magic, working a very familiar I IV V chord progression and bare bones rock beat into something that somehow sounds strange. This simplicity is contrasted by the totally bizarre lyrics about light freaking out dying, God being a soul masturbator, and extraterrestrials handing out pamphlets of light to singers. I have no idea, but it certainly puts some images in your head. “Reptile” was originally recorded for 7 Worlds Collide, an Oxfam-benefiting charity CD curated by Liam Finn (of Split Enz and Crowded House fame), and it features Finn and Wilco drummer/improvising musician Glenn Kotche collaborating (I think) on one the most awesomely asymmetrical drum parts I’ve ever heard in my life. It kind of sounds like they brought them into the studio, and had them play along with the song the first time they’d ever heard it. It’s a kind of spontaneity that is so seldom heard in recorded music in a day and age when people tend to favor rigidly orchestrated parts over the conversational style of several musicians playing together, playing off one another (one could easily make the argument that this is a self-perpetuating cycle caused by a simultaneous rise of overdubbing and decline in technical skill among rock musicians, but that argument is probably best reserved for another forum). The song itself is so easy to follow, and the main bass and snare pattern so constant, that the percussion track is able to slip into part after part on instrument after instrument (congas, woodblock, rhumba-infused rim clicks, big cymbal splashes, laconic hi-hat, atonal marimba, thundering toms, metallic shakers) and never risk losing the listener. The fact that chorus of women’s voices that kicks in on the chorus sounds like a group of untrained singers in a room (you can hear them laughing sporadically clapping during the song) only adds to the feeling of looseness and lightness that makes “Reptile” so lovely and lively.

Germano’s music these days is “about trying to be happy with all the sad shit in the world, dealing with your own fights and being the mighty one who rises above it,” and that is as straight-forward and noble a mission statement as I’ve heard from a musician in a long while. It’s plain as day when you listen to her songs that this is the truth, and, for those of us who’d rather explore than be inscrutably hip, it’s as refreshing as a spray mister full of cold water on a summer afternoon in the park.

Gabe Birnbaum

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