Monday, March 23, 2009
Monday Music #12 (Lucie Thorne, Kate Fagan)
In my music database, which unfortunately is still languishing, neglected, one of the first categories I set up was nationality. Sorting your collection makes you realize certain things - namely, how lopsided the categories are. A lot of the United States, a good deal from the United Kingdom, some across Europe, but after that? Limited, to say the least.
Now, flying things in has a few drawbacks. It throws higher shipping costs and fruitless brick-and-mortar searches in my way. You pull information in rather than having it pushed at you. I've always been averse to push models, though, and I've always liked researching things I like.
But the fact is that most of what I discover is, more or less, by chance - what people write, what I hear. This is probably nothing but rationalization, but it's what I've got. So there's really no deliberate reason why it happens that both the artists today are from Australia, except that someone found their music worth writing about. As did I.
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I discovered Lucie Thorne, for instance, her being compared to Kate Bush. I have a Google alert for that because Google owns my soul.
Not all of those Google alerts, of course, make it into writing. A lot of them don't. Sturgeon's Law: A lot of people are just forgettable. Lucie Thorne isn't, though. Earlier this month, she released Black Across The Field, and from what I've heard of it, it's excellent. This isn't an album of gimmickry or quirkiness-for-its-own sake. It stands on songwriting, and what it has is excellent. "The Basic Rules" has a delightful jauntiness and "Over in Threes" is just great, crunchy and breezy at the same time.
And take "Alice." Here's a perfectly crafted song. The beginning's aggressive enough to grab your attention, never quite settling into one mode. Underneath, the song is building, but it's just subtle enough to go unheeded. And then, at "sway," the song does: floating all of a sudden, becoming wistful. It's a mood that's sustained through the entire song - and it's fairly long - through key changes and sighs, refrains and backing swirls.
Listen here.
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If Lucie Thorne is gimmick-free, Kate Fagan, who she's performed with, is even more so. She performs acoustic folk music, influenced, she says, by "the old world." Cormac McCarthy is in her top friends. It's almost jarring to listen to this from a Myspace page, on a laptop, indoors. I should be walking outdoors, or at least in view of a field.
But just the music is more than all right with me. Every spring, I seek this sort of music out. It must be something about the sun reappearing, and the sticks bursting into trees. Some of it fades once summer sets in, but I suspect her music won't.
Reviewers have described it as country-folk, which is about right, if a bit generic: in one fell swoop, it removes everything grating about some country music and placid (there's that word again) about some folk music. What's left is dynamic, assertive, and well sung. Kate has two voices - a more traditional folk voice, and one that's fluttery, a bit like Beth Orton's.
There are three of them up. "One More Drive," by far, stands out. It's along the same lines as What Bird's "Highway Song" (but more acoustic) or even some of the later songs on Speedbath. The chorus, in particular, sounds like Kate heard it, by chance, by a traveler, who heard it from another traveler centuries ago. It makes me forget all about lopsided categories or quotas or, for that matter, what's trending this year. Good music is timeless.
Listen here.
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