Aly Spaltro’s stage name and backstory may at first seem awfully whimsical; the name Lady Lamb the Beekeeper came to her in a dream, and she first started playing and practicing in the basement of the video rental store where she worked near her hometown of Portland, Maine. So far, so Fox Searchlight. But forget fey; that basement gave her license to get loud, and the songs on Ripely Pine are true to their original forms, bolstered with rugged, hefty arrangements largely written by Spaltro. Her bodily, biblical epics call to mind Jeff Buckley, Okkervil River, Jack White, Helium, and the Dirty Three.
The lyrics of Ripely Pine are hungry for love and experience and bone-picked honesty. She explains the title as a kind of openhearted longing, though it's gorier than that: “Let’s crawl all over one another like crows on a carcass,” she sings like Sharon Van Etten leading a gospel choir on opener “Hair to the Ferris Wheel”. “Like ants on a crumb starving only for the taste of tongues.” It leaps and pivots through soft woolen strums to freewheeling 1990s alt.rock-- that structural skittishness is a constant throughout-- and establishes Spaltro’s palpable experience of love as a messy, fetid thing, perhaps more remarkable for the fact that she wrote these songs when she was 18, 19. “Love is selfish/ Love goes tick-tock-tick/ Love knows Jesus/ Apples and oranges,” she sighs of its many coexisting contradictions.
“You with the nape that holds my gaze/ You with the tongue that speaks my name,” she glowers on “Aubergine”, slyly sizing up her intended like prey on a plain. The brooding interlude comes amid truly joyous New Orleans-style carnival blasts, and the song’s broiling-over stream of consciousness approach makes it feel like an incredible street party. The best songs on Ripely Pine are unpredictable in a way that’s refreshing because of their sloppy energy, not in spite of it. Some of them have been worked on for five years, but they’re executed with unaffected confidence rather than niggled perfection; there are pitchy vocals here and there, and with only three songs under four minutes and almost everything playing out like the closing number of a headline festival set, it’s much too long. While her gentler solo songs are pretty enough, they can also be samey, making the hour length even less necessary. But what Ripely Pine has that much comparable rousing-but-empty country-tinged trad rock doesn’t have is raw, credulous fire.
The best songs here are all nearly seven minutes long, but their erratic structures make compelling stages to watch dueling tirades of emotion swarm around one another. Spaltro wields ferocity and timidity equally well, to the extent that it’s hard to tell which is her more frightening mode. The incensed “Bird Balloons”, an unresolved tale of betrayal, regret, and acceptance, has an excellent, spat pay-off: “My hair grew long so I fucking cut it/ And when you looked away I stuck those trimmings in your locket, ha ha ha ha.” “You Are the Apple” eases into a bluesy lope and twang, and then a swashbuckling burst of timpani and strings, Spaltro screaming, “I still need your teeth around my organs.” What should be the payoff to the Alabama Shakes-loose “Crane Your Neck” is Spaltro howling “I’m as blue as blood before the blood goes red,” in a cadence borrowed from the hilt of “Fake Plastic Trees”; its “twist yo’ hips” shimmy-to-fade epilogue is unnecessary and a bit rote.
The “blue blood” line crops up a few times on Ripely Pine, notably on “Aubergine”, where Spaltro comitragically sings about how someone makes her “into an egg without yolk,” making it clear that she means the lifeless shade of blood, not the regal kind. Conversely, Ripely Pine is one of the most nourishing, deeply alive records of this young year. On closer “Taxidermist, Taxidermist”, she reconciles with herself: “‘How do you do?’ I say/ ‘I’ve heard such lovely things about who you are and where you’ve been/ But be in me again.’” These songs are about Spaltro five years ago; hopefully reassembling the parts doesn’t mean locking up these messy song banquets for a neater record next time around. The taste is too addictive.
