As Lady Lazarus, California dreamer Melissa Ann Sweat crafts intimate miniatures, mostly for solo voice and electric piano, and then slowly drowns them in oceans of reverb. As short patterns of chords or intervals revolve hypnotically, overlapping layers of echo and decay well up around them until only the tips of the keyed notes glint out. The music lands somewhere between Grouper and Erik Satie, though Sweat's singing has a decidedly folksy cast. This balance of cool circumspection and human warmth is just one of the deep contrasts churning her music's simple surface. It's impossible to decide whether the music is constantly changing or totally still, a strangely placid kind of tension that never fails to draw me in.
I fell hard for Lady Lazarus' first full-length album, Mantic, which I still love. But in hindsight, I let myself overlook the meandering stretches, which are scarcer on new LP All My Love in Half Light, recorded in San Francisco with Papercuts' Jason Quever. It will sound instantly familiar to fans of Mantic-- at least once you get past the brassy "Lapsarian"-- but its proportions are sturdier and its vocal melodies more sharply honed. Instead of slipping off into the distance, Sweat strongly projects from the center of the frame, though her romantic lyrics are still strewn about in coded fragments. There are new production touches that enhance the sound without diluting its essential simplicity: Faint harmonies ring the vocal of "Eventide" and a cello discreetly flickers through "Constant Apples". The means are still strictly limited, but more versatile than they sound.
There are essentially four different types of Lady Lazarus songs here, all of which have analogues on Mantic. Sweat helpfully fills the four opening slots with an example of each, setting the parameters for the rest of the record. There's the type that ditches piano in favor of accordion, tucked away near the end of Mantic as "Pearl" but audaciously beginning All My Love as "Lapsarian", where Sweat belts like a Sacred Harp singer over the noisy instrument. There's the type built around a tone-packed pulse, such as the gorgeously tolling "Goudanov", and the type built around a silence-packed theme, such as "Wonder, Inc". And of course, there's the type built on pearly scalar columns: "Eventide" is this record's answer to Mantic standout "The Eye in the Eye of the Storm", speeding up when she sings and dragging when she stops, as if the piano were feeding directly off her voice.
While the beauty doesn't flag in the second half, the forms do start to repeat, with "Edge" recapturing the wistful blur of "Wonder, Inc"; "Constant Apples" the regressing mirrors of "Goudanov". Even so, Sweat manages to glimpse some striking new vistas from within her familiar straits. With its bobbing major chords and images of ships on the Atlantic, "Argosy" is as sun-bathed and spacious as her usual songs are misty and occluded. A blizzard of trills descends on the low, craggy "Gleam", closing the album with an unusually bracing chill. Lady Lazarus' music is so drowsy and rapt, so vast and alone, that I always wondered if clearer recording and bolder singing might ruin it. It's a relief to discover on All My Love in Half Light that that's definitely not the case.
