Julie Byrne doesn't sing her ice-crusted songs so much as murmur them beneath her breath. And "finger-picking," while accurate, feels far too percussive a word for her guitar playing; it's more like she brushes the strings with her fingertips, like wisps of hair obscuring her vision. Live clips show Byrne performing to reverent groups of three or four in cafes, where she barely rises above the sound of milk steamers and muffled coughing. Her album, Rooms With Walls & Windows, feels like a secret she's keeping from you, even when it is safely in your headphones. If you are listening while walking the streets of a city or while commuting, I recommend noise-cancellation; someone briskly turning the pages of their magazine next to you could drown her out.
Byrne currently lives in Seattle, but she skipped there like a stone across the country—first Buffalo, then Chicago. On "Marmalade", she describes what she's searching for: "All I want is a brick house with a porch that wraps around/ All I want is land enough for my child to roam." The language in her lyrics, once it emerges into your awareness, is strikingly conversational, but not like any one kind of conversation. She alternates between vividly dark imagery—"I lean back like a woman baptized in the River of Styx," on "Wisdom Teeth Song"—to the breathlessly naïve: "The Museum of Natural History in its snow, blood, and fur and ivory/ It left me wanting to know so much more about this world" (from the same song). Her delivery doesn't make clear if these sentiments belong to her, or if they are bits of life she's picked up listening to others.
She sings everything in the same cloaked, low voice, and over the same skeletal arrangements, which gives even the mundane sentiments a portentous ring. Her version of folk, a whisper bordering on an ambient hum, will be familiar to fans of early Cat Power, or Grouper's Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill, as will her ability to mine the uncanny from the everyday stuff lying around. Byrne occasionally tests your personal boundaries for what constitutes "enough" happening in a song: Many of her songs are not only two chords, like "Marmalade", but two notes, hitting like alternate condensation drops on your forehead while her lyrics follows drowsily afterward.
Some of the most memorable and indelible moments on her album are when she leaves off of words and hums into the ether—at the end of "Holiday", after she has sung "And I do travel alone, but yours is not a number I can call on the phone," she follows it with a wordless melody that seems to put a full stop on the enigmatic thought. You can hear it again on "Prism Song", which follows up the hypothetical scenarios of the lyrics ("If you were a prism with the light passing through") with nothing but a wordless sigh. Sometimes we locate more meaning in sound than in sense, and Byrne's album sits at the nexus where one melts gorgeously into the other. The album concludes with a few glowing rays of synth, an arpeggiated tonalization that sits in place for about four minutes and dies away. The sounds are distant, foggy, and alluring, like echoes of echoes, the original sounding long gone.
