Portland, Ore., is lousy with folk acts, but Musée Mécanique distinguish themselves from the throng by ignoring Americana influences and infusing their brand of intimate melancholia with lush arrangements and electronic underpinnings. While they may not sound like other bands in their local scene, Micah Rabwin and Sean Ogilvie's collective is clearly an integral part of it. Witness their delicate, affecting debut, Hold This Ghost, which features contributions from fine hometown musicians like Laura Gibson and Norfolk & Western's Rachel Blumberg.
Despite what their band name may imply, the Northwestern group isn't remotely French, taking their moniker, instead, from a California museum of old-fashioned coin-operated music boxes. The name fits them, as the ambiance they've created on Ghost is, at once, haunted, ornate, wistful for the past, and not of its time. Though almost every song is built on a foundation of gentle guitars, it is the baroque orchestrations of poignant strings, weeping accordions, and flickering organs that give this collection its hazy soul and hypnotic core. Album closer "Our Changing Skins" adds flourishes of the singing saw to its dulcet chamber orchestra and chirping-bird samples to temper its sweetness, tinting the tune with a nostalgic sepia tone. And "The Propellors" layers a similarly haunting saw swoon over its gauzy melody, illustrating its historical lyrics ("December 17th, 1903/ Propellers turn to wings/ The age of air at hand") with its otherworldly ambience. The fact that Musée Mécanique choose to tell the story of the Wright Brothers' first flight, not as a celebratory pop song, but as a drowsy, ghostly apparition of one, tells you a lot about their aesthetic.
Even their more straightforward acoustic folk songs use subtle, imaginative arrangements to imbue an antique patina to their goosebump-inducing melodies. "The Things That I Know", the album's most direct folk song, is built on a fingerpicked base that feels like a whispery Iron & Wine accompaniment, but its fairy-tale glockenspiels add a shimmering weightlessness to the heavy introspection. And "Somehow Bound" is the kind of aching, love-lost ballad that Elliott Smith mastered, complete with nakedly depressive lyrics-- "I hear you laughing through the wall/ It's been two hours, just one call/ Talking on the phone with some guy that I might know/ I hope I don't know." But by tweaking Smith's acoustic formula with a brooding keyboard drone in the background and twinkling glockenspiels adding a light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel brightness, Musée Mécanique artfully side-step the rote strumming and self-indulgent woe-is-me-ism that plagues many Smiths wannabes.
Though their instrumental experimentalism is key to their overall sound, Musée Mécanique owe a great deal of their evocative power to Rabwin's emotive tenor. Like Sufjan Stevens without cheerleaders (or, frankly, cheer), Rabwin has an elegant clarity and regal sadness to his tone and, because he enunciates each word, listeners will not only understand every lyric he sings, but also feel them too. It is that ability to viscerally effect an audience that make Musée Mécanique such a powerful, if unusual, folk force. Their shy yet florid debut is tinged with sadness, like a painted carousel sitting empty in winter, mourning for a time they-- or we-- never even knew.
