Author: Sam

Sara Hallie Richardson: A Curious Paradox

Sam

Curiouser and curiouser

Sara Hallie Richardson says hello, to say goodbye

Sara Hallie Richardson, we hardly knew ye. Just as she holds her coming out party, and CD-release joint, next weekend, she plans a move to New York City the following week [this originally ran in February 2009].

Don’t worry, though. She says she’ll be back. And let’s hope so. The girl has a voice like the icicles hanging from your rooftop, crystalline and sharp (and you kind of want to lick them a little bit). She knows how to put together a song, too. She professes a love for Bjork, and you can hear it on her debut disc, the nine-song A Curious Paradox, with its digital whirs and spare arrangements and vocal wanderings. But she has a bit of Feist’s playfulness, too, to counter some Joni Mitchell world-weariness.

She’s also a cold weather girl. She studied music at UMaine, recorded the album at Bangor’s 32Central with Michael Flannery (of Feel It Robot), and turns icily fine lines: “Never mind the winter/ Never mind that snow will soon collapse your heart.” That’s from “Seymour,” which, with its plodding snow-shoe bass, quick inhalations of crisp sound, and finishing wind chimes, is cold through and through. 

It’s a refreshing cold, though. While warm, crunchy guitar tones can certainly wrap their arms around the listener, Richardson instead aims for frigidly distorted organ chords, like those that open “Sulu,” spare and echoing to a fade. It’s the crisp nostalgia of “the night, it fell upon us/ The sky of cobalt blue/ The prospect of having all of us together/ But no one showed/ Just you and I/ And in each other’s arms/ We found home.” It’s a song like sitting out in the snow, wrapped in snowpants and blankets, and staring up into the brightest stars the Maine woods have to offer, the moon casting a half-time daylight.

And though it becomes a bit formulaic even in the nine songs here, it’s a thrill when the manufactured beats charge in aggressively late in the song, drums heavy on the high hat and soaring vocals that grab you by the throat.

It’s the same charge you get out of the late-arriving electric guitar churn in “Penny Castles,” or the rolling backbeat and swarming organ in the second half of “Bottom of the Sea.” It would be too easy to call it letting her hair down. It’s the tension and build the Cambiata employed to great effect on To Heal, for a recent example; a long, slow crescendo wasn’t out of place among the romanticists.

Luckily, Richardson doesn’t always give in to this construction. Sometimes he lets the tension burn and simmer, as with the excellent “Lonely Hearts.” The three single notes followed by a strum in the open are all that ever backs Richardson as she lets her voice crush you with its simplicity, only arcing a bit lower into a minor chord for “then came the day/ You turned and walked away.” For a 20-second mid-song bridge there is a bit of acoustic guitar rolling fingerpicking. Then it’s back to that 1-2-3-strum. There are very few voices that could get away with nearly three minutes of that. But it’s lovely and enchanting.

Her falsetto in “Sandy” — it’s easy to fall for it, let’s say that. It’s enough to forgive a line like, “As I watch the leaves fall from trees outside my window/ I realize why they call it fall.” Especially with that stand-up bass, brushed cymbals from the drums, “that’s what saved me.” Her tremolo is pretty fine, too.

And I honestly don’t know what to make of “Sometimes,” a cover that’s not a cover of the Jonathan Edwards tune. See, the whole song is actually there, from what I can tell, complete with what sounds like the hiccoughs of a record player, and Richardson seems to be singing harmony backing vocals over it, way high up in the register. It’s like that time Natalie Cole sang with her dad, adding her vocals to his track, except instead of bringing an old track into the present, Richardson seems to be purposefully pushing “Sometimes” deeper past its 1971 roots, turning it into a Judy Garland ballad of the early 20th century.

As a thought-piece and an album closer, both, I think it works. But with only nine songs here in total, I guess I’d rather hear what else Richardson has up her sleeve.

Not just a vocal talent, she’s got some very interesting songwriting ideas and manages to avoid many of the singer-songwriter conventions that young great female vocalists often fall into as solo artists. New York City may very well embrace her and keep her in its clutches, but should she return to our little scene, she ought to be warmly welcomed back.

Cult Maze: The Ice Arena

Sam

Cult of personality

Warming up to the Ice Arena

If you’re in Nashville and you play on somebody else’s record, you’re a session musician. If you do it in Portland, you’re just like everybody else. If you’re doing a pop-rock record, call in Spencer Albee and go record with Jon Wyman. If you’re doing a jangledy indie rock record, call in the Extendo-Ride All Stars.

This latter crew debuted with some shows in 2001, Jay Lobley, Peet Chamberlain, and Joe Lops playing musical chairs on stage, with the basic aesthetic being whoever wrote the song gets to play guitar. That crew, with Brandon Davis, then produced the excellent You Are at the Top Level, You Can Not Go up Another Level, released by Pigeon Records in 2002, where they displayed a wide repertoire of musical genres and generally impressed with the songwriting ability.

Lops followed a photographic career out of town, but Chamberlain, Lobley, and Davis stuck around, hooking up with the likes of Andrew Barron, Sydney Bourke, Jeremy Alexander, Aaron Hautula, and Casey McCurry in bands like An Evening With, Diamond Sharp, Satellite Lot, Isodora, Phantom Buffalo, and Esprit de Corps, part of a tight community of indie-pop/rock musicians alternately lining up behind varied and sundry songwriters.

Eventually, says Barron, Lobley “decided he wanted a band for his material and he asked the three of us [Barron, Chamberlain, and Hautula] to help him out.” The result was the Funeral, but that was the name of some metal band, so now it’s Cult Maze, who managed to release a very interesting full-length earlier this summer [this originally ran in the fall of 2006], The Ice Arena, recorded with Marc Bartholomew last year.

All of that is to say that this is Lobley’s record, but it is informed by years of collaborations and co-bills, and the sound is very familiar to those who’ve become fond of a certain sect of musicians in town who are fond of this jangledy indie sound.

But what if jangledy indie pop doesn’t jangle, but rather sort of buzzes and groans? What if Architecture in Helsinki and the Arcade Fire decided to dress themselves like Pavement for Halloween? The result might be something like Cult Maze’s 10 songs here, swimming in ’80s nostalgia while dressed in lo-fi ripped jeans and Goodwill T-shirts.

Remember that lo-fi sound I was all excited about that Marc Bartholomew carved out for Ruler of the Raging Main? Well, it works to lesser effect here – there’s nothing wrong with the sound, per se, but the melodies Lobley crafts suffer without a crispness, and the lyrics are largely lost in some of the wash and scrabble. It’s hard not to wonder, actually, if the vocals aren’t intentionally buried.

Still, Lobley’s bouncy guitar hooks from You Are at the Top Level presage the jolt of melody that opens Ice Arena and “Another A to Z,” and much of the admiration of the pop canon that filled that first album helps this succeed in similar fashion. In this case, the vocals are deep in the mix and sound like they’ve been sampled through a Casio keyboard from 1982, but they develop a sneer for “We Are the Dead End Streets,” which plays with rushing and stalling rhythm. There are echoes of the UK here, whether it’s the shoegazer set or the Madchester crowd.

“A Shell in the Waves” is more upbeat, with a climbing bass line that finishes with a back-and-forth curlicue of sorts from Hautula (who’s since left to focus on Satellite Lot full-time, replaced by Joshua Lorring, formerly of Certain Numbers). Maybe elucidating his songwriting style, Lobley sings, “I talk to myself/ With anyone else/ my imagination is my friend,” somewhat reminiscent of early-Cure Robert Smith. The chorus has a call and response period, with the response slightly clipped, like it’s barely making it through a bad connection. In the bridge, Lobley’s guitar and the bass feed off one another, building off Barron’s steady time on the drums.

“Vox Torsion,” opening with a keyboard line form Chamberlain, is probably the best song here, with a swagger like the Stray Cats and shouts like Big Country. Chiming and descending guitars introduce a bass providing a repeating melody for Barron to perform over. Like many songs here, if this tune had radio ambitions, the chorus would be more distinct, the verse quieter, but this tune doesn’t have radio ambitions (even if WMPG did play it all the way through at one point this summer).

Perhaps most thought-provoking is the nine-minutes-and-more “On a Branch,” something of an anomaly among mostly three-minute pop numbers. A singer-songwriterly opening with a picked out guitar line is pretty weepy. Finally, the cymbals enter and drive the anticipation that isn’t quite consummated by the fairly off-key balladeering that follows: “We make mistakes to hide from the truth/ I’m haunted by the ghost I gave to you.” The song ambles into some Springsteen rock and some vamp before announcing, “they can’t touch us anyway.”

The music fan with an extensive catalog will spend much of this album trying to put a finger on just what these songs sound like, and just what this band is trying to accomplish. In the end, it’s hard to argue the sound isn’t original and consistent, despite its many influences, and that may very well be a goal attained.

The warm nostalgia is an added bonus.