The second album by Canadian singer/songwriter Lullaby Baxter hints at multiple pasts and a candy-coated, just-out-of-reach future. The title, Garden Cities of To-morrow, is a reference to British urban planner Ebenezer Howard's 1902 tome of the same name, which laid out a futuristic vision of communities that married town and country life in a single setting. Howard was also an avid Esperanto speaker and is partly responsible for inspiring Disney's Epcot. Baxter's jazzy alto, meanwhile, carries echoes of singers like Ella Fitzgerald, with a sprinkle of pixie dust rather than the venti cappuccino smoothness of such like-minded chanteuses as Norah Jones and Madeline Peyroux. Pop duo Hercules, who produce, lavish Baxter's songs with the 1960s baroque-pop perfectionism of their overlooked 2004 album, In the Alleyway.
Garden Cities of To-morrow lacks the touches of artful noise that intermittently added texture to In the Alleyway, though a few storm-like tendrils do strike the lounge penguin-cruise of "Antarctica". Hercules' Peter Baldwin and Ben Sumner are like French duo Air with a yen for orchestras instead of synths and fewer TV commercial gigs. Flugelhorn leans against shy acoustic guitars on "Little Song", while standout "Sugar" opens with pulsing "I Am the Walrus" Mellotron before dissolving in country-rock lead guitar licks, delirious strings, whirling Wurlitzer, and ostinato bass line. A flute quartet, harp, timpani, marimba, and even djembe dress up other tracks in full Herculean garb, with Ennio Morricone's flair for the cinematic.
Baxter herself carries on the quirky yet sophisticated style of her 2000 debut Capable Egg, with one foot in over-the-rainbow whimsy and the other in the contemporary singer/songwriter tradition. She's prone to eccentric figurative language that straddles the line between endearing and irritating, depending on your taste: the relatively spare "Cardboard Armoured Car" is full of 'em, culminating in "The world is my potato," while the most Jones-like track here, "Fontana Fontaine", jumps from "you loved me like a circus" to "good old Kansas City". She gets the mixture just right on the aforementioned "Sugar": "Cursed at the moon/ 'til you both turned blue", as Wurlitzer bends nostalgia into pathos.
Garden Cities of To-morrow is an acquired taste: both too weird and too ordinary at once, but when Baxter matches her urbane oddities and Hercules' pastoral popscaping just right, it's like a stroll through leafy, tree-lined city blocks in early autumn twilight. While Baldwin and Sumner have yet to work with songs that perfectly suit their approach, this album's best moments set their distinctive arrangements alongside bits of jazz and fairytale magic, a masterwork of urban planning for a city out of an enchanted kingdom. Not Epcot, though.
