The songs on Liz Durrett's second album live trapped, eyelet existences. Marked by stark sensations seemingly told in refracted flashback, the claustrophobic, eerie tales offer slight slivers of menace. Listening is akin to being shackled and bound, watching someone (or something) doing something nasty to someone else. Each affair is vague and stealth and frightening. Tied together by the Georgian's voice-- a too-calm whisper that sounds like Chan Marshall after 36 sleepless hours-- and ominous background interference from producer/uncle Vic Chesnutt, The Mezzanine has all the proper elements of a Southern séance. Given all that, the album should be quite captivating. Instead, much of it ends up being mystery for mystery's sake-- a cabin-fever thriller with little more than a litter of loose ends.
Considered the 28-year-old's first "adult" album (last year's Husk featured songs Durrett wrote in her teens), The Mezzanine still suffers from the same lack of musical variation that plagued her debut. Though she has honed her particularly unsettling songwriting style, the unrelenting slowcore pacing does her few favors. Chesnutt attempts to add flair to with flickering backgrounds made up of omnichords, xylophones, and distorted guitar, but such embellishments are often too low in the mix to sustain any type of impact. Durrett's voice and purposeful acoustic strums are projected strongly throughout, but her phrasings, progressions, and unidentified pronouns often run together, creating a sense of wandering tedium.
Unsurprisingly, one of the only tracks with an identifiable pulse, "Cup on the Counter", is also one of the most engaging. Random observations (a cup stain, tiremarks, "ashes on cinders") arrive at a typically ominous hook: "Why try to lie to me/ I'm not a child, I know what I see." Of course, there's no real inkling of what "what" actually is, but the tone of a childhood gone awry (the track is book-ended by a contextually creepy conversation between a young Durrett and her grandfather) is rendered with enough unadulterated mood to satisfy. Yet by the second half of the album, the singer-songwriter's techniques become thin and songs begin to crawl along, drearily drunk on their own enigmatic presence.
The Mezzanine doesn't fail as much as it disappoints. Durrett's voice is both preternaturally warm and haunting-- a rare combo. And it's sad to hear it languish. On the record's last track, "In the Throes", Durrett finally breaks free from her endless, quiet croon and works her vocal chords a bit. In an otherworldy way, the soulful waltz even slightly recalls the Aretha fave "Runnin' Out of Fools". Such minor emotional openings are enticing but they're exasperatingly underrepresented on this album of fractional storytelling and aimless dread.
