David Wingo is better known as a soundtrack composer than as a songwriter, and you may have heard his music already in most of David Gordon Green's films or in the new Jared Hess mess, Gentlemen Broncos. Yet, as Ola Podrida, he emphasizes lyrics and music equally, using each to evoke what the other cannot express. Ola Podrida may bear some similarities to groups like Band of Horses and My Morning Jacket-- in the expansiveness and Americana textures of his songs-- but his second album, Belly of the Lion, is unlikely to get fists pumping or crowds surging: Wingo is a strong live performer, but his music remains private rather than public, introverted rather than outgoing. He projects these songs inward, creating a record that is quietly cinematic.
Belly of the Lion is more compact than Ola Podrida's 2007 self-titled debut, which means it is sharper, shapelier, and only slightly less substantial. Lyrically, the themes are identical: Every silver lining has a dark cloud, and relationships of any kind-- whether romantic, familial, or social-- are fraught with the potential for loss. What makes them especially affecting is their specificity: Wingo fills these songs with concrete nouns, proper names, and crystalline details, effectively rooting them in a real and recognizable world. "Your Father's Basement" imbues its coming-of-age story with a certain vérité, as two teenage boys blast Eric B. & Rakim and look for dirty mags behind the water heater, while the music crests into an uncertain conclusion that lends magnitude to their adolescent conspiracy. Elsewhere, Wingo's guitar shimmers as "Lakes of Wine" pans across a tableau of mysteriously related images: a notebook found on the side of the road, a phone number scrawled on a bathroom stall. There's nothing out of the ordinary here, yet Wingo invests each carefully selected object with symbolic weight.
And yet, these lyrics would have much less power without the music. Wingo recorded Belly of the Lion in his apartment, playing all the instruments himself (although he did hire a drummer for four songs), so the range of sounds is limited. Their range of use, however, is not. He knows just how to score these miniature movies to enhance their drama-- when to bring in the droning guitars to bolster the tension of "Donkey", how to overlay the delicate melody of "Monday Morning" against a backdrop of guitar distortion, how to wring maximum effect out of an incremental tempo change on "Roomful of Sparrows", and when to counter a stormy crescendo with a stark acoustic guitar on closer "This Old World". Such techniques, no doubt picked up during his soundtrack work, draw out deeper shades of meaning in his songs, balancing optimism with despair. Or, as he sings on the countrified opener "The Closest We Will Ever Be": "There's always some shadows within the prettiest of scenes/ I'll cast one on you, and you'll cast one on me." That realization gives this short, modest album an inordinate emotional heft and makes it linger long after those last notes have stopped reverberating.
