As a Steely Dan fan, I found the past two Drag City albums by Chicago singer-songwriter Azita intriguing. Startling, too-- at least considering her background in the Fall-meets-Melt-Banana noise-punk group Scissor Girls and the no-wavey Bride of No No, who were about as far from the pristine smoothness of Aja as you could get. Unlikely as the source may have been, 2003's ballad-wracked Enantiodromia and the following year's marginally poppier Life on the Fly (which actually went so far as to mimic the cover-art aesthetic of Countdown to Ecstasy) were likeably skewed mutations of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen's sardonic, piano-driven jazz-rock, right down to Azita's outsized caricature of the latter's hiccupy vocal tendencies.
But Azita Youseffi seems to have gotten most of the "Doctor Wu" out of her system for How Will You?, a more traditional (if subtly unnerving) take on cabaret-pop. It's harder to pinpoint a singular aesthetic here-- she's expanded the range of her voice, settling into a more comfortable and subtle series of melodies that still retains some of her unique character, and she's branched out into a broader array of musical styles that give her more room to stretch out her compositional artfulness. Ideally, this expanded palette would sound like a breakthrough for an artist once constrained by a more specific frame of reference, yet still retain fans who enjoy piano lounge music transformed into brooding strangeness.
The problem is that, musically, it's a bit too polite: the jazz-rock influence is still evident on "Things Gone Wrong", but it sounds a little mannered, more in the vein of Ben Folds Five's arch faux-cheeriness than the moody melancholy of her last two albums. "Scylla and Charybdis" boasts the most startling vocal performance on the record-- an aching, keening wail that evokes Debbie Harry undergoing a complete nervous breakdown-- but that vocal has to carry the entire song, since it's backed by a listlessly strummed acoustic guitar that might as well be an afterthought. And even with only nine songs on the album, she goes to the well more than once on one idea: The early 1970s post-Beatles mode of "I'm Happy"-- think Badfinger in their more downtempo moments-- is a compelling-enough opener, but then it's practically reprised, with only a couple of chord changes and some additional atmospherics, two tracks later on "Away".
The compelling moments are there if you're patient. "Come William" is a wintry, slow-build piece that pits a brisk, intense piano against an otherwise-elegaic arrangement, and the gradual shift in "Laughter Again" from lonely-sounding early Joni Mitchell balladry to vigorous alt-country-tinged guitar rock should make Neko Case fans happy. But most of the appeal to this album will be in Azita's voice and lyrics, which are accessibly versatile and somewhat impenetrable, respectively. It's saying a lot that she can make some of this stuff work; lines like "Hey you with the lightning eyes and the starry fate" ("Things Gone Wrong") and "Bonafide when the summer calls the tune/ In pale alabaster" ("Laughter Again") read a bit like bogus poetry without her alluringly sharp/sweet voice to back it up, and it's easy to drift away from listening to what she's singing in favor of the way she sings it. If this album evokes anything, lyrically or otherwise, it's the feelings that arise when love and ambivalence cross paths, maybe best personified in the last line of "Come William": "I don't want to mean or believe or seem anything/ Only want to carry along." Maybe that's why so much of How Will You? sounds only halfway captivating.
