As anyone who's ever addressed an audience over a PA or listened to their own voicemail message knows, the recorded voice reverberates differently outside of one's own head. Listening to Mike Bones' (née Strallow) voice on his debut album, The Sky Behind the Sea, is a lot like hearing your own through a set of speakers; the experience is disarming, odd, and above all sort of unpleasant. This is not to say that Strallow is a bad singer-- he doesn't sing off-key or lose breath, and indeed, a limited-run 2007 live show suggests that his pipes hold up better in a club-- just one whose voice never quite shakes that alienating feeling of hearing something unexpected for the first time. It's like he's trying to sing like Hank Williams, or maybe trying hard not to. It's a sensation that colors all of The Sky Behind the Sea, Strallow's debut as a singer and songwriter.
To learn that Strallow actually made his name as a guitarist on New York's underground circuit-- he has backed Damon McMahon and Lizzy Trulie and plays with members of Oneida and Oakley Hall-- is like that time everyone told you Jeff Buckley's Grace was one of the best guitar albums of the 90s. Really? The insistent emphasis on Strallow's voice throughout The Sky-- only "Town Crier" makes an attempt to shift weight to the arrangement-- seems like a willful subordination of talent. When he steamrolls the final minute of "Pope John Paul" with rough distortion or disrupts the middle of "Love's Not Yours", his fingers expose a flare and complexity that his lumpy verses rarely achieve.
The Sky's eight songs are almost relentlessly tuneless and dour. If Strallow has a sense of humor or lightness-- a clever song title like "The Enemies of My Enemies Hate Me Too" suggests he might-- he rarely exposes it. Even "Enemies" loses its wry punch when you realize that it's quite literally a tale of spiteful persecution ("They would not let me be/ They took all I had from me and left me desired and diseased"). Strallow occasionally offers a strong image-- during "Do You Wish I Left?" he mutters "I don't want what I came here for/ Still I beat my knuckles upon his door"-- but too much of The Sky is a self-serious stew. When Strallow does break the mold, you wish he hadn't: the album's most memorable line bookends "Pope John Paul", "Pope John Paul/ You're my man and all/ But you wasn't always fair".
Strallow's most obvious sonic parallel is Leonard Cohen (even on the outliers: compare "Town Crier" to "First We Take Manhattan"), and like a Cohen album, The Sky contains quiet, woven arrangements subservient to their bandleader's maundering. Strallow's voice, odd though it may be, never growls or whispers or contorts. Instead, he hangs in the air, humidly, casting himself over every moment of The Sky, save those rare occasions when he allows his guitar to speak for him; Strallow can only wonder at his instrument's articulation and passion.
