But while his music bleeds familiarity from every pore, Lionheart remains hard to fathom, as the video for "Small Planet" gives us yet another representation of him. Not hirsute and vaguely self-serious, but elfin and vaguely self-mocking: Playing a tiny piano on a cardboard moon, wearing what appears to be a white satin scarf, Lionheart's self-portrayal in the video is too absurd to be anything but parody. Pantomiming the song's lyrics, he actually chases a woman in a fox mask through the forest like some reaver in a Conan the Barbarian novel, albeit one mapped onto a Victorian idyll. But if you can get over the fact that he sounds like Rufus Wainwright with a bad head cold, the sweeping melody has a pleasantly overstated allure.
Concise intro "Un Ballo Della Luna" is more discerning, a casually doleful acoustic blur that takes the syrupy tang out of Lionheart's voice, which seeps like an ooze over roomier piano ballads like "Call Me the Sea". The more agile ivory-tickling of "The Car Maker" seems to nudge Lionheart out of his stupor, less stuffy Rufus and more drowsy Sondre Lerche. This liveliness is sustained through the down-stroked bounce of "A Bell and Tumble" and picks back up with the hotted-up big-band jazz of "Before We're Dead", but on "Under the Texas Sky", everything melts back into a puddle of back-porch strummery and soppy harmonies. "Youngest Frankenstein" lets us know what Devendra Banhart might sound like were he captured from the wild and domesticated: Secondhand personality is as close as Lionheart gets to the real thing on Catch the Brass Ring.
Of course, the album can't coalesce a persona out of all these red herrings. It's impossible to get a sense of who Ferraby Lionheart is, or even who he'd like to be, which is an important aspect of his singer/songwriterly genre-- we're meant to get a sense of direct communication, as if the singers are teaching us about ourselves by speaking honestly about themselves. Specificity has to somehow make itself known through the thick archetypal veneer. Lionheart's fondness for devices like Southern Lit speech ("We can make a meal of dust/ Mary's in the market mural" he sings on "Vermont Avenue", building something more like a diorama than an actual scene) and schmaltzy string embellishments create too many layers for us to perceive him specifically, hearing instead a mostly pleasant (if sometimes overbearing) amalgam of canonical American songcraft, rendered as a closed form. Lionheart's somebody-- something about his earnestness seems cagey and calculated-- but he seems to be going to great pains to conceal who, and in the end, the elaborately staged and topically skittish video for "Small Planet" is the best visual representation of his mannered musical pantomime.
