Visual art has its negative space, psychology and philosophy speak of lack, science continues to grapple with the great mystery of dark matter, and organized religion would be at a total loss without its pantheon of all-powerful invisible über-beings (to say nothing of all those optical illusion blocks that spell JESUS). Point being: What's not there often counts for as much as, if not more than, what is. Music, too, of course has its share of sounds defined by the silences that surround them, and Seattle's Jesy Fortino is one of the finest purveyors of such sounds going. Hands Across the Void, her Sub Pop-stamped 2007 full-length debut as Tiny Vipers, felt strung together by the spaces between the notes as much as the singer's formidable voice, a wayworn and woebegone warble. Indeed, that record's title calls to mind the act of strumming across an acoustic guitar, the "void" in question being the empty space within the instrument's body-- the very non-thing that allows it to resonate.
This same sense of lack and loss, and of the power of all things absent and missing and distant, surges through Fortino's follow-up, Life on Earth. The title is ironic, taken as it is from a line on the record's 10-minute eponymous centerpiece. "Don't look back towards me/ I'm as empty as the sea/ Back before there was life on earth," Fortino advises there, decisively undermining any warm and fuzzy notions the words "life on earth" might give us with a staggering image of a vast ocean of nothing. The music on Life, centered on Fortino's stately strums, only bolsters this image. Even when new sounds surface, such as the foghorn-like bass drones that carry "Time Takes" into "Young God", the whistled passage at the end of "Development", or the phantom chimes that punctuate "Twilight Property", they don't so much fill the void as draw further attention to it. Fortino's lyrics play to the prevailing mood as well, eschewing proper nouns and direct allusions completely and abounding in unnamed "he"s and "you"s who seldom seem to exist in the record's present. Nearly every song makes mention of death, interment, or ghosts; summertime easy listening this ain't.
Taken as a whole, Life doesn't really depart from Hands Across the Void (itself not exactly a cheery record), but rather refines and builds upon it, besting the previous album's runtime by a factor of 1.5 and boasting, as a bonus, a number of melodies that stick like tar in spite of their spareness-- particularly on the title track, opener "Eyes Like Ours", and album highlight" Dreamer". At nearly 65 minutes, it's relentless and uncompromising in its vision. Yet despite the lyrical preoccupations and the unyielding sense of absence, that vision is not necessarily a bleak one. Solemn? Sure. Severe? At times. But Fortino remains a consistent and oddly reassuring presence throughout. She isn't lamenting her woes nor letting herself get swept up in them, but rather surveying and relating, almost always with a certain austerity and remove. Only very occasionally does she break form and let the emotion behind the words loose, and when she does, the intensity is chilling. By the final bars of closing track "Outside", she can no longer contain herself, honing in on one last sentiment and sharing it eight times over: "It will always be somebody else [outside]." You can almost feel her eyes ablaze as she repeats it; it's as though she's at last harnessed the power of absence and made it her own.
