At first glance, Orion Rigel Dommisse's debut What I Want From You Is Sweet sounds like the output of another fanciful bard in the Joanna Newsom mold: electric cello player singing narrative set pieces about twin girls telling ghost stories, hushed conclusions about the flesh ("The body is a breathing thing/ I'd like to keep it warm") under sweeping strings courtesy of Espers star and album producer Greg Weeks. It's even on a cozy imprint (Language of Stone) of Newsom's home label Drag City.
But something dark and serrated is hidden among all those would-be costume folds. Upper register vocals and manicured strings and Wurlitzer aside, this album is ten songs (a taut 38 minutes) of sylvan murder ballads, equal parts Nick Cave fatalism and delusional, pastoral noir. Look no further than the ominous, grayscale cover art: a grove gone to seed; sinister, overfed goats circling a well in the foreground; a black growth bulging from a tree; a young woman walking a path to a beat-up trailer tilting in the background.
The album opens with a song called "Fake Yer Death" and a line of grim prescription-- "Fake your death/ If you need to"-- which unfolds into the macabre instructional ("Make sure the bones look something like your own"). Then a haunting narrative about two questionable young girls (Ghosts? Murderers?) luring a man to his death in the ocean set above a nodding Omnichord waltz ("Alice and Sarah"). Then, on "Simon Sent For Me", 8-bit piano twinkles and another string of troubling imperatives: "Get out of the ocean/ Get into the cave/ Don't drink from haunted fountains/ Stop rubbing graves." Message: received.
As a vocalist, Dommisse stays guile. She's extremely choosy about how and where she articulates her lines. On "Suicide Kiss (Because Dead)", she buries each line's first half, smothering words under rising tidal strings and ambient buzz that the listener can only retrieve single images and phrases until the hook, "Because death, because death/ Will open my heart," intercedes. Death holds court on Sweet. It's the featured word in four of the album's ten song titles. And it's the revisited, reexamined subject of pretty much every line and sentiment on the album. Even when Dommisse trots out an uptempo, nearly-major-chord song ("Capricorn"), she uses it to link her speaker with the astrological goat-- a traditional symbol of, among other things, lechery, winter, formality, and darkness.
Dommisse keeps the darkness relatively compelling. As the Plath-like obsessions veer into monochrome, the sounds of Sweet become, consciously or unconsciously, an attempt to balance the pervading shade of the album. Her cello feels wedded to her murky lyricism, so it's the troika of Dommisse's electric piano, Omnichord, and Wurlitzer that anchor the lighter, almost fanciful electronic backgrounds (her MySpace page playfully has Legend of Zelda as one of her influences). This is a tricky balancing act, and Sweet does a fine job keeping its sharpness and its hidden, er, sweetness, in dialogue. Nearly 40 minutes of a gloomy wood nymph debut is as much as any sane listener can handle, but it speaks well of the album that after all those fatal lessons and imperatives, there are still some very real questions left over. Namely, what stories does Dommisse have left to tell? And how many people are going to die?
