Outside there's rain. My feet are cold, and I am sleepy. My living room is a mess of crusty, unusable brushes, jewel cases, and paint-splattered newspaper. An especially aggressive shade of mandarin orange, recently applied, covers some walls but not others, and all of my ugly furniture is crowded into a small space in the center of the room.
Nevertheless, I'm relaxed to the point of guilt. I don't give a fuck if this place never gets cleaned up-- just as long as this disc keeps spinning. O'Neil's slippery, sireny, poisonously beautiful voice cuts through the disorder of her richly unnerving arrangements and makes me want to hit repeat until I rub off my right index-fingerprint.
On last year's Peregrine, O'Neil broke from her Sonora Pine/Retsin/Rodan stylistic past with a haunting and moody, yet still somehow ineffectual collection of songs. But on In the Sun Lines, she's refined her approach and forged new ways to, as her label's website put it, "paint with sound."
What she paints is not always quite comforting. "This Morning," an eight-minute dirge-lite of a song, is an effective and very repetitive soundscape of claustrophobic piano tinkling, ominous acoustic guitar overtones, and O'Neil's ghostly vocalizing. The musical arrangement, except for the decorative guitar bits, could have been a loop. The slow, chugging pace of the song sounds like muffled machinery, and the occasional accordion exhalation sounds as if radioed in from someone else's nightmare.
The opening track, "The Winds You Came Here On," is among the album's most straightforward and prettiest. The song's widely spaced chords are strung together by lightly struck and submerged single notes. O'Neil's voice is sweet and accusatory, singing the tensest of melodies, until all the buildup spills over into the gorgeously simple and vocalless chorus.
"Your Rats Are," with Ida's Dan Littleton guesting, is a southern-flavored mood-fest of sweepy sounds and sudden cellos that burst like curses from a deranged person. The song is an ode of sorts to New York City, but the feel couldn't be further removed from the metropolis. The sleigh-bell percussion and chanting vocals provide the album's darkest, most evocative moments.
"In This Rough," Sun Lines' seventh and finest track, demonstrates O'Neil's "songwriter" qualities better than any other. She sings the album's best melody over the waltz beat suggested by her guitar strumming, while off-color and fluid-sounding guitar notes mark the harmony with dissonance like intermittent rain drops.
The charmingly named "New Harm" sees the album out the door with a clutter of nerve-wracking chimes and the kinds of sounds a grandfather clock might make if it could double over in pain. The song has no vocals and no structure, save for the forced symmetry of its beginning and ending sections. Instead, it seeks only to reinforce the album's main theme: uneasiness. The ending gesture is almost excessive, in that whatever disconcertion O'Neil was trying to cause in the listener is long established by the final track.
Still, In the Sun Lines is a resounding success on many fronts. The beauty of O'Neil's melodies stick with you, but no more and no less than the pervading sense of danger and fear that emanates from her tense musical arrangements. The net effect of these opposing forces is a resigned and drugged relaxation. Hopefully, though, O'Neil will tease out her gifts for melody and "song" on her next effort, in addition to pursuing perfection in the form of these beautiful but stifling mood-pieces.
