Thursday 10.29.09: ALELA DIANE / MARISSA NADLER @ echo

aleladiane

Diane demonstrated her broad range and flexibility, interpreting songs by artists as disparate as Vashti Bunyan, Jesus and Mary Chain, and Daniel Johnston on 2008′s The Silence of Love, which she recorded with some musician friends as Headless Heroes. To Be Still will never fire up any parties, but its emotional range is as wide as that covers project’s– from “Age Old Blue”, a wistful duet with craggy-voiced troubadour Michael Hurley about Diane’s sharecropping Scottish ancestors, to the flushed-cheek, string-surging “My Brambles”. Lead track “Dry Grass and Shadows” sets a playful tone, the sigh of steel pedal underlining her languid, country-twangy come-on: “I like to look at your teeth lined up in perfect rows… Where the flatlands stretch inside your mouth/ And when you laugh all the star thistles tumble out.” A little hippie-dippy, but also utterly enchanting.

The album’s first single, “White as Diamonds”, best showcases her expanded musical ambitions and the record’s pristine sound (coproduced with her bluegrass musician father in his studio). Two years ago, accompanied by acoustic guitar, Diane previewed the newly hatched song for Daytrotter (second station of the cross for up-and-comers after Blogotheque) and claimed “Diamonds” is about silence and uh, snow. Disingenuous-sounding, for sure, but it’s not like she’s the first artist who’d prefer not to parse lyrics. She’s also absolutely right: Simplicity is key to the song’s stark power, and its uncluttered vocabulary of fiddle, cello, guitar and drawn-out, warbled “wooooahs” are as head-clearing as a cold February morning. Fill its white spaces with what you will. – Pitchfork

with:
Marissa Nadler