Azita Youssefi's voice is turbo-welcome: It is poseless, free from oppressive emoting and trilling and traditional seductions, like a one-person Greek chorus. (If you have never heard her solo work, imagine a waaay restrained Karla Schickele or Carla Bozulich. If your mp3 collection is sexist by default, shame on you, and then imagine a waaay restrained, and female, Jeremy Enigk or Andy Lemaster.) This voice is ready to make interesting music, and it comes with hands that refuse to bore a piano.
But this 11-minute release is howlingly inessential. First, the lyrics on Detail From the Mountain Side are by Brian Torrey Scott, for use in his play of the same name, and they're leaden with faux-philosophical sub-musings that consistently climax in new-age clichés. [The author claims the lyrics are a spoof meant to be sung by "idiots"-- Ed.] (Okay, in the interest of excessive disclosure, I am days older than this guy, got cussed out by a bipolar live-in laundromat attendant the other night, and cannot believe that Scott's been allowed to teach at the Art Institute of Chicago. The internet contains several portentous passive-voice-employing works of his that you might enjoy, in which characters say "We're pretentious," after stage directions indicate "Things are changing.")
"William James spoke of the waves of consciousness.Under the sun we live as one.Every soul has got a goal to understand.We all need to feel real.Individually we're all tangly among the fog of time.I think of things and everything in smaller terms...The truth of life all day and all night is in the details,And we've all got so much to learn."
That is deeper than Deep Blue Sea, the film in which LL Cool J outswims a supershark. Speaking of water, check this out:
"I am going to sing a song about the circular nature of the world.Just like the world is round, the lakes evaporate into the clouds,And the rain comes down.The rivers flow into the ocean.Everything goes back again."
No shitdrizzle! Ease up, Simba! S'like Oprah and Mount Eerie had a baby named...Dr Phil Elvrum! S'like Carlos Castenada mystifisting that lovably oblivious Forrest Gump! And the un-idea of vapor redistribution gets reprised on the closer, "Evaporation", during which Azita seems to strain most to fit her winningly original arrangements to the verbiage's agenda, a la the awkwardest moments of Art Bears or Joan of Arc. Not to mention the under-understated production, which I'll wager is the result of some Drag City mid-tier studio/mixing-board presets. Go ahead and try not to think of Chestnut Station or David Grubbs while listening to this.
As much as I relish Scott's ditsy, redundant, patience-raping platitudes, I hereby admit that "Love Is" contains a beautiful nod to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. And: The transition from the Loose Fur boogie of the second track into the Lennonist procession of the third is among my favorite bits of sequencing this year. But Azita is a talent deserving a less gratingly aspirant lyricist. Too much of what she sings on this EP earns what a reviewer famously typed about Albert Camus' novel The Fall: "One might define stupidity as the state of needing to be told this."
