Au revoir to the piano bar: the ladies fronting trip-hop and downtempo "ensembles" are the torch singers of our time. From Portishead to Beth Orton, the sultry lady of yore has grown electronic-savvy and more powerful, while still emitting a hella-tragic, star-crossed and/or doomed existence via her breathy, lilting voice. Australian-now-Chicagoan Tania Bowers sings with an extraordinarily breezy, half-lidded and dreamy timbre-- a cooing, shivering, meowing tendril of a voice; you can picture her lying on the ground with the back of her hand pressed to her forehead, tragically, like a dying 30s actress, bow-lipped and spidery-eyelashed in the burning sunlight. (Okay, a little more subtle than that, maybe, but you get the picture.)
Under a Different Sky is Via Tania's first proper full-length, following a six-song EP and a twelve-inch for Different Sky's "Lightning & Thunder" (which included a pretty decent, depressive cover of New Order's "Temptation"). Check out the list of indie-famous friends who helped her make it: Scott Herren (Prefuse 73), Doug McCombs (Tortoise), John Herndon (Tortoise), Howe Gelb (Giant Sand), Wayne Montana (Trenchmouth), Chris Brokaw (Come), Noel Kupersmith (Chicago Underground, Brokeback), and her husband, producer/engineer Casey Rice, who's worked with Joan of Arc, Tortoise, and Liz Phair among many others. Based on that who's-who laundry list, you get a pretty good idea of what Under a Different Sky sounds like: a downtempo confetti of glitch, sweltering bass, isolated beats, and glimmers of synths and samples, as well as the sweet curlicue vocal rubdown of Tania Bowers.
But-- and here's the shocker-- it's not boring! It's actually very subdued and delicate, if never so delicate that you feel compelled to tiptoe around its frailty. The minimal instrumentation is pulsing with ethereal, watery flourishes, and gives you the dribbling, comforting sensation of being encased in a mold of warm strawberry gelatin. Bower's shivering voice operates much in the same way as the production: with tiny subtleties, vibratos, and inflections appearing for a brief second, never to return. It's a compelling mode for a torch singer, but often, her breathlessness traverses into a slightly asthmatic wheezing, and you're all, "Baby, you gotta get that shit checked out." It's a minor issue-- with this sort of atmospheric downtempo, you don't want Joan Jett barking over it-- but its lesser quality is amplified when she drops the self-conscious, wilting, airy thing and just belts it out seductively, as on the transfixing, guitar-heavy "The River", or the fire-invoking, jazzy nature of "Boltanski".
You could chalk up her labors to vocal experimentation and an effort to sound more profoundly wrought, but with the gossamer nature of the production, the music doesn't want for much else in the way of fragility. It mostly needs a slight bit of contrast, possibly in the form of Bowers' increased vocal confidence. With that, Via Tania will be a major contender in the sizzling future of passionate wraiths crooning dramatically into laptop mics across the world.
