Scout Niblett's music is as monomaniacal as a student at practice. When she plays drums or guitar, or worst of all, when she breaks out the ukulele, she persists with mechanical patience, switching chords like she's just getting the knack, and rendering some pretty decent lyrics in either a sing-song or a monotone. The plainness of it all is disarming, and not in a good way: it's like a child who's just stopped being cute. And that's not even counting the crayon-and-marker-colored liner notes.
Around the eighth time she sings, "I am an emergency vehicle," you wonder if anything's wrong, yet nothing here points to a crisis or problem-- in fact, this is some of the most transparently confident music around. Instead of giving us a mystery or asking us to psychoanalyze her, she seems to be striking out boldly, expecting us to take her as-is. Or, as she puts it in the liner notes: "I'm not a dreamer. I make things happen. I also coach."
What seems so weird may just be the simplicity of her style, how ur-punk her tools are-- the lack of colors, the bare singing, and the use of repetition all suggest that any additional instrumentation or melody or anything other than the most starkly minimal elements would be an excess. Granted, Niblett occasionally receives some support from another guitarist and drummer, but even they seem to value sparseness, and more often than not, they're nowhere to be found anyway: most of I Am consists simply of Scout alone with an instrument, singing in that folky-dry British voice that has mostly been commended for how American it sounds. And Steve Albini-- the perfect engineer for this project-- captures her in perfect, quiet solitude.
I Am, though more settled than her crazed singing and amateur drum-bashing on the I Conjure Series EP, is still pretty far from the minimal but warmly bluesy Sweet Heart Fever. On "Drummer Boy", the guitars fall like an avalanche, but other tracks are so focused they become faintly desperate: she gets some yearning tones from her ukulele, buried under the annoying ones. As for the lyrics, they reveal more subtlety than you infer from her singing. "Texas", for one, is rather elegant with its "postcard from an art school girlfriend" language: "And Texas is hot/ Even when driving at night/ And Texas is sci-fi/ And Texas is plain/ And Texas is alright", each verse punctuated by a whomp on the drums.
This record is definitely an acquired taste, but what you get is an appreciation for a difficult but ultimately honest artist, stripped out of the "rock" or "country" labels into a private cave of her own-- like anything that wasn't 100% Scout got cut and thrown away, and whether you like what's left, at least you know it's hers. This kind of record is no fun to rate, because where I'd want a little more anything (more developed songs, maybe, or a little more emotional range in these parched-earth vocals), I know that others will be hit in the gut by every weird little tune on this album. Like any kind of nakedness, it's up to you how to take it.
