What's the color of your favorite album? You've wasted many a midnight hour, slow from cheap wine and a sleeping problem, glaring passively at the projections emitted from your laptop's media player. Tonight it's Music Has the Right to Children, and translucent splashes of blue and green seep into each other as though it's the music that's summoned those images and not some random computer processor.
Stand with the Stillness of This Day, the dramatic debut from Montreal songwriter Elizabeth Anka Vajagic, is relentlessly black. Its seven slow, tear-drowned laments paint a dark and unsettling otherworld that you want no part of; a derelict, rat-ridden distopia of neglect and madness which she draws with such vividness that, at times, it seems as though you're already there; strapped in the backseat whilst she gives you the guided tour.
Enlisting some of the most recognized hired-hands from the Montreal community, including Sam Shalabi, Godspeed's Efrim Menuck, and Silver Mt. Zion's Beckie Foon, the record works as a suite of paceless, funereal death-dirges built around sparsely strummed guitars, layers of cello and piano, and all the background dissonance and distortion you've begun to expect from a Constellation release.
When it works, it all sounds chillingly evocative. On "With Hopes Lost", Foon's cello weaves around the space between each slow guitar chord, as Vagajic's voice bellows the bruised refrain, "Let it go now, before your hopes get lost;" Efrim Menuck echoes the sentiment on backing vocals, and inserts a sublime jazz-piano line. Maybe it's just Menuck's inclusion in the line-up, but you can't help thinking that this baroque chamber-folk was the sound he was striving for on This Is Our Punk Rock.
Certainly, one of the advantages that Stand with the Stillness has over Silver Mt. Zion's last outing is that Vagajic can actually sing. Her voice is a powerfully versatile instrument, capable of mewling a seductive moan similar to Lisa Germano, and then breaking into a lung-bursting bawl with impressive ease. And when combined with Chris Burns' guttural, guitar-driven shrieking on "Where You Wonder"-- a wailing cortege of Neanderthal drumming and music-box harmonium-- it hits the mark of fear and paranoia that this record's entirety seems to strive toward.
However, lyrically, the record is left wanting. As side-splittingly sincere as caterwauled lines like "How could such happiness end?" may be, Vajagic is no Leonard Cohen; her words aim for the dull and direct rather than the vague, subtle and oblique. Furthermore, there's little room on the record for variety of form or structure. On the toiling, seven-minute-long "Iceland", you sense a certain degree of formula following; a guitar strums without charisma, propped-up by some characteristically sorrowful cello and standard piano flourishes, but because the structure echoes that of every other song on the album, it leaves the listener restless and with a diminishing attention span.
Still, this record possesses undeniable promise for Elizabeth Anka Vajagic. Though it's too reliant on a dark and unwieldy texture to be truly affecting, and too stuck on repetition of form and ideas for it to be praised purely on musical terms, Stand with the Stillness of This Day is, at its best, a collection of ragged, haggard and howling post-folk songs that mix acoustic elements with chilling dissonance to conjure a dystopic nightmare that might be closer to the real world than we'd care to admit. She may have spent too long staring into the darkness, but she's making a beautiful shade of black.
