It's been more than two years since Brooklyn singer-songwriter Lia Ices let her debut record, the frail Necima, slip quietly into the world. She's stepped up a notch or two since, inking a deal with indie-rock behemoths Jagjaguwar and recruiting Justin Vernon to provide a guest vocal turn on this album's second track, "Daphne". There's also a more pliable approach this time around, with Ices subtly contorting her core sound, taciturn balladry, to fold in meatier bursts of guitar and percussion. The key asset on Grown Unknown is her impressively supple voice, which can spiral up into a giddy falsetto and fall crashing to the floor in dolorous rumination within a heartbeat-- although it's occasionally hampered by the uneven backing that Ices latches onto her vocal hankering.
The salient difference between this album and the last is bound up in that vocal zigzagging, which sounds less stiff and more relaxed than before, with Ices mostly eschewing the Tori Amos/Joanna Newsom territory of her earlier recordings for a distinct tone of her own. The instrumentation ticks over at a funeral-paced cadence throughout, but Grown Unknown never settles into a distinct pattern otherwise, often making great stylistic leaps within single songs.
When Ices indulges her avant leanings, the material provides a more suitable foil for her voice. A mixture of finger snaps, glinting piano, and subdued organ provides a suitably artful backbone over which she hangs a touchingly forlorn vocal turn on "Little Marriage", and there's a deft marrying of chamber music sadness and welts of distorted guitar on "Bag of Wind". But it's the standout title track that provides the most successful conduit for Ices' eclectic whims, with a militaristic handclap and acoustic picking alongside feather-light string parts. Here Ices sounds relaxed, locating a natural meeting point for her disparate sounds and easing into a vocal that effortlessly intertwines with the arrangement.
Elsewhere, the album continues in its asymmetrical way, rarely gelling as a whole but intermittently spilling over with intriguing embellishments. A few tracks strain under the weight of their own influences-- "After Is Always Before" could be a female-fronted Grizzly Bear circa Yellow House, while "Ice Wine" veers closely to a Cat Power vocal performance. "Lilac" heralds a possible way forward, beginning with the kind of deathly muted backing reminiscent of Mark Hollis' lone solo venture outside of Talk Talk, then emerging into the half-light with a slow-burn patter of drums. That kind of less-is-more approach, where all the clutter is shaved down to a paper-thin framework, is where Ices produces her most affecting material, potentially sketching out a new strain of inspiration for her to follow next time out.
