What sets The World Is Just a Shape to Fill the Night apart from a lot of what gets called "folk" these days is that it is fiercely unsentimental. But if you gaze back a little further, Jesse Lortz's obsession with pistols, poisons, drownings, and all-consuming spiritual darkness is part of a great tradition; the Anthology of American Folk Music has a notoriously high body count. Even though nobody dies during The Night, it flickers with a constant barrage of unsettling images: knives being sharpened on hearts, blood mixing with saliva mid-kiss, and an address to a lover that begins, "You lifted up your skirt and took a piss right in the street/ You shook it off your thigh and your eyes said, 'I know you're watching.'" And that's the love song on the record.
None of this macabre humor should come as a huge surprise to those familiar with Lortz's old band the Dutchess and the Duke-- especially if you've seen the video for "Mary", at the end of which he and bandmate Kimberly Morrison become rather gleeful-looking cannibals. After the Seattle duo's 2010 break-up, Lortz's first solo effort under the name Case Studies is unremittingly bleak. As far as contemporary kindred spirits go, Lortz's human-sized expressions of cosmic loneliness call to mind Bill Callahan's recent Apocalypse, while his penchant for raw, naturalistic guitar tones evoke the Tallest Man on Earth. Lortz is blessed with neither Callahan's God-sized baritone nor Kristian Matsson's ambulance siren bleat, but what he lacks in an immediately identifiable vocal signature he makes up for with the distinctness of his sparse, evocative songwriting.
Right from the start, The Night is a portrait of people's fumbles toward connection. (Spoiler, though all the minor chords provide some clues: they are often totally futile.) Quietly haunting opener "From the Blade of My Love" begins with an image of Lortz awake and restless while the girl beside him sleeps contentedly-- the first suggestion of the insurmountable chasm that's sprung up between them. Things go from bad to worse on the terrific post-break-up ballad "My Silver Hand", on which he confesses, "I'd like to still be in your bed/ But I would settle for your life instead," with the shattering plaintiveness of somebody who knows that even the lesser of those two things probably won't happen. Beneath Lortz's pleas, a backing female vocalist provides tepid consolation with a few "la-la-la"s, but she even sounds chillingly distant, as though she's singing from another room.
The World is Just a Shape to Fill the Night is preoccupied with both the surface of things and the ugly disorder that lurks beneath them. On "From the Blade of My Love", the smoothness of his lover's skin belies the "war inside raging," while the electric twang of "Lies" spells out a lengthy itemized list of things you're better off never bothering to ask your lover ("How many days will I love you?" "Will I ever hurt you again?") because the truth deep down "will only make you cry." But believe it or not, there's respite-- of sorts. After the slight lag of "California Ghost Story", the closer "The Day We Met"-- a starkly recorded guitar and vocal track-- is a dark and strangely tender love story between two outsiders that ends with this pontification: "It's the way of the world/ People come, people go/ People mark each other up and sometimes get to love awhile." Which, coming off the weighty darkness of the previous 10 tracks, doesn't sound like such a bad fate after all.
The Night was recorded by Greg Ashley of the psych rock band Gris Gris, and he and Lortz are certainly not the first 21st-century folkies who have tried to conjure the ghosts of Harry Smith's America. But the textured and purposefully naturalistic production on The World Is Just a Shape to Fill the Night never feels like an affect; it's a fitting sonic reinforcement for the record's musings on detachment, distance and isolation. The Night is a record uncomfortable with all the trappings of the corporeal world-- time, words, its own skin-- and occasionally, improbably, it actually breaks free of them all.
