In the most disquieting dreams, the horrible thing doesn't just appear; you suddenly realize it's been there, unnoticed, all along. This dream-sense of something unspeakable about to break into the open permeates Spielerfrau's debut LP. Recalling a sedate Nick Cave or Scott Walker-- no overstated theatrics here, just darkly glistering innuendo-- Spielerfrau's elegant gloom manages to be stately and spry at once. Fluid acoustic guitars crack into hard-edged starbursts; a Wurlitzer burbles and moans; subtle shifts in emphasis outline the disaster without naming it. And lest the band be perceived as no fun, here's "Alt": A sleek, Krauty burner complete with smarmy robot-voice, "pseudo-bisexual bobbysoxers," "Ms. Arulpragasam's paper tigers in press releases," "a Midwestern hausfrau's dirt-thirst." It's a great, over-the-top diversion on a record that's otherwise the model of circumspection. Vocalist and Pitchfork contributor Michael Idov could never get away with lyrics like "November Third"'s "I want to kick someone in the face" if it weren't for the subtlety of his posh-ghoul murmur, the starry funeral march seething beneath the sentiment, and the subsequent motivational softening-- the violent act is an attempt to "bring back better days," when impulse trumped decorum.
The tension between politesse and rapturous sensation is Idov's central theme, and over the course of The Sad Part, he develops it with wit, tact, and striking language that serves specificity and beauty, not Decemberists-style ostentation. Symbolically loaded artifacts sweep across the somber record like blushes of candlelight in a dim room-- tablespoons of ash and thimbles of asbestos, garden fountains and marble wells, shards of glass in cocktail ice and seagulls in car parks. The gently unspooling "Social Call" is a digest of buttoned-down, post-break-up banality, except for the one erumpent image of a "hate-fuck, pressed against a subway grate, in yellow snow, with trains below." But the dissatisfaction cuts both ways. On "Long & Happy", the burglar-protagonist-- and who could be freer from social constraints than someone who invades the homes of others?-- sits on a stranger's bed, closes his eyes, and sees "a long and happy life," which he can obliquely access only through the theft of objects: "Some money, a hi-fi, a chef's knife." In Spielerfrau's world, one sings about objects and scenes because one isn't allowed to sing about feelings and events. And at any rate, the actual murder is prosaic compared to the looming shadow of the knife, or the knife itself, pulsing with the coiled menace of no context.
