Scout Niblett's fifth album in as many years is engineered by Steve Albini and features four duets with Will Oldham. The record's world could be described as sonically anemic, which, it turns out, is a pleasant place to be: mired in cloudy, druggy reflections, Niblett seems to sit cross-legged, figuratively speaking, head down, a blonde wig perhaps obscuring her presence from her audience. It's only the moping we're allowed to watch, dislike, enjoy-- the crawling, dreary movements of her vocal cords, which take center stage on tracks like "Let Thine Heart Be Warmed", a rather Nirvana-y rock number without Oldham decorated with rangy, mangy verses.
When Oldham appears, it's to temper Niblett's exhausted rage with see-saw guitar and vaguely romantic lines like, "We can rest our bones side by side," to which Niblett responds, "It's so fun to see me being me/ Alongside you." The spineless beauty of the guitar on this traditional, "Do You Want to Be Buried With My People?", is of course indebted to a folk tradition epochs old, one driven by a voice's romantic story, but it's to Cat Power that Niblett owes a lot of her songs' pleasure; the two singers have voices that are at equal turns milky and smoky, brave and terrified. But Niblett has declined to make her own Greatest, that troubling, robust kind of album that scares old fans and probably entertains them, too. Instead, Niblett remains underproduced, downtempo, depressing, and teetering on forgettable, at least in the ear of the inattentive and quick to move along.
The strengths and weaknesses of "Kiss", one of the album's meatier tracks, dance around each other like its two vocalists so often do: a guitar turns in a drunken daze, awakening to the groping howls of Oldham and Niblett every dozen or so measures, and those piercing voices scar the somnolent listener's ears with a passionate chorus, "It coulda killed me," ("it" referring to the kiss of the title). But the guitar melody is so predictable it's almost irritating, and the fiddly violin that careens in the background is just as dull. Cut out the melody, and the power and presence of the vocal line is fantastic, but the duet seems strained-- even trapped-- in the obviousness of the other instruments.
There is a dark, fiery, peaceful quality to a handful of the album's tracks, which is comforting after the riotous interludes of the aforementioned selection. Still, even a gorgeous Buckley remembrance on "Black Hearted Queen" can get a little boring in places. The melody is inventive, but the Cat Power faxes get a little much; it's something that can't really be helped, but it's nonetheless distracting. Where it works is on the stormy monster "Yummy", which cavorts into a creepier minor-key melody that saves the same group of instruments from sounding as tritely arranged as they do on some of the ballads. And when supported by the line, "Oh forgive me, I think I'll eat you," the song becomes even more engrossing than its strings already allowed.
The spacious and playful "Dinosaur Egg", which follows, has remnants of Bettie Serveert, the Police, and Liz Phair among its echoic guitar and chatty vocal line. Patience reveals that the last chunk of this album's 14 tracks is where all of its essentials lie. On the ultimate, "Fishes and Honey", a piano makes its mark for the first time, an interesting choice that seems tacked on, but not pointlessly so. It's a beautiful way to close things out, a kind of nose-thumb to anyone who didn't make it all the way there. But as with most elegantly downtrodden folk albums, this one takes a handful of listens before its gems can be properly appraised.
