There's a moment toward the end of "Hometown Hooray"-- from Phylactery Factory, Casey Dienel's debut as White Hinterland-- that reveals her range and potential impact under this new moniker. The song begins as a breezy ditty, with a girl, Dienel's narrator, carving her lover's name into the trunk of a cypress. He leaves for war and, of course, doesn't return, inspiring the townsfolk to tie yellow ribbons around every tree in the typical patriotic memorial. Seeing this marker over his name, Dienel sings, "I rip that ribbon off the tree, burn it down by the river that now shares your name." It's a startling, simple, and poetically defiant act, neatly and decisively wiping away the politics and statistics to find the human being. "No one wants to believe you died in vain," Dienel concludes, as her piano returns to that original breezy theme: There is a bittersweet freedom, she discovers, in accepting the meaninglessness of the tragedy.
Phylactery Factory is Dienel's follow-up to her 2006 debut, The Wind-Up Canary, a loose collection of quirky pop songs delivered with a light touch-- always an underrated quality. Since then, she has signed to a new label, adopted a new stage name (but why not something that doesn't sound like a death metal band?), and assembled an impressive backing band that features Laura Gibson and members of Norfolk & Western. Nevertheless, White Hinterland remains essentially a solo project that showcases Dienel's songwriting and vocals, and Phylactery Factory is a more ambitious, more professional, and more complicated record than its predecessor, with dark jazz-pop flourishes and compositions heavy with words. It is, however, not quite as rewarding.
After the seven-minute "Hometown Hooray", which is heartbreaking despite her self-consciously Homeric affectations, comes "Lindberghs + Metal Birds", with its bouncing bassline from the Village Green's Dave Depper and an energetic performance from Dienel. It's a perfectly acceptable, if somewhat self-satisfied, anti-military/industrial/what-have-you anthem, but on Phylactery Factory it completely ruins the solemn tone of the song that came before. More than a mistake of sequencing, this abrupt transition reveals Dienel's divided interests with this new project. She has one foot in the real world, with its insoluble tragedies, and the other foot in her own private imaginarium, with its eccentric wordplay and clever anachronisms.
Given that a whole arm of indie pop seems devoted to storybook lyricism, this could be an intriguing stance, but Dienel's mix of willed naïvete and kneejerk cynicism creates some jarring shifts on Phylactery Factory, muddying instead of illuminating her songs. Occasionally, but not often enough, the force of the music compensates. "Napoleon at Waterloo", the album's most uptempo song, rounds out the wartime trilogy, disconnected from the present but still worth it for its spiraling momentum and Dienel's spirited, even angry repetition of "There goes another man down." Likewise, "Dreaming of the Plum Trees", about vast class discrepancies, alludes slyly to Suzanne Vega's "Luka" and Paul Simon's "Me & Julio Down by the Schoolyard". But mostly, her wordy compositions make for dense, leaden songs like opener "The Destruction of the Art Deco House" and "Hung on a Thin Thread", which move slowly and sometimes not at all. Ultimately, what was intended as an ambitious artistic leap forward feels more like a slight step to the side.
