Winter Family are a duo, and their music is as black as the cover of their self-titled 2007 debut. Even when they use humor and irony, the material shades dark. Winter Family had a track called "Auschwitz" that found singer Ruth Rosenthal describing, in a sing-song little-girl's voice, a magical snowglobe containing a tiny replica of the concentration camp, complete with starving prisoners and an iron gate saying that work is the key to liberation. The duo's songs typically combine her exceedingly strong, deep, yet wounded voice with Xavier Klaine's keyboards, which veer from the heavy drone of the harmonium to impossibly delicate piano chords. She is originally from Israel, and Klaine is from Paris, though both are now based in Brooklyn; she sometimes sings but often speaks her lyrics, mostly in English but sometimes in Hebrew or French. Given the presence of her rich and heavily accented vocals and the harmonium, one obvious reference point is Nico, particularly the style of gothic cabaret she perfected on The Marble Index. Winter Family's songs are are "heavy" in every sense of the word, to the point where they sometimes threaten to become claustrophobic. And their second full-length, Red Sugar, is, if anything, even more bleak than its predecessor. But they also have a way of leavening the nightmare with glimmers of beauty, just enough to keep the music from getting too oppressive.
The songs on Red Sugar tend to alternate moments of everyday life-- lovers falling into open arms, the sound of families getting drunk, birds shaking the water off their bodies, cats asleep in arms-- with impressionistic images of war and pain. You get the feeling of small lives being lived as a larger world of misery rages outside. "Dancing in the Sun", a nearly 14-minute track that serves as this album's centerpiece, shows their skillful use of contrast. The first half is a tense and jittery mix of minimalist piano, crashing cymbals, and assorted creaks and groans, a grisly sound above which Rosenthal muses on industrialism, global warming, and fear of the future. But halfway through, the track fades into a long stretch of silence and then explodes into a field recording of a demonstration: It's a rally in Jerusalem featuring John Hagee and his group Christians United for Israel, and they're praising the country because of the role it will play in end-times Biblical prophesy. The juxtaposition of the menacing music with the at-first cheerful but eventually more frightening sounds of the mob is striking, and the words hint at the group's focus on the politics, religion, power struggles, and prejudice that bring people into conflict.
The prickly burst of crowd noise in "Dancing in the Sun" exemplifies another terrific thing about this project: Winter Family's willingness to make unusual choices. "Omaha" is a creaking, harmonium-driven ballad whose lyrics ("Why did you go, my boy, to fight in a war that is not yours?") seem to describe the Normandy landings in WWII. But then Rosenthal punctuates her spoken words with the mouthed sound of mortar shells exploding-- "Ka-bough! Ka-bough!" It's the kind of thing that looks questionable on paper and that most would have been embarrassed to try in the studio, but it winds up working brilliantly, evoking a child storyteller's description of a horror. Another surprising turn comes during "Shooting Stars", an achingly slow, mournful, and ultimately gorgeous piano ballad, when Rosenthal moans and wails wordlessly at the end of every stanza, her vocalizations expressing what her words cannot.
As moving as I find this record, it's not an easy sell. It's such a weighty thing, exerting a constant pressure that is only occasionally relieved. But as harsh and despairing as Red Sugar can be, there's also a yearning for warmth and humanity, a desire to be lifted into the light. The key to it all is in how completely Rosenthal and Klaine inhabit this music: We never wonder for a second if they are really feeling it, and that makes it easier for us to feel. So if you have the time and inclination to give yourself over to Red Sugar, you'll find a fully formed and coherent world that's rich with emotion and dense with meaning, and the closer you lean into it, the more it opens up.
