When you first hear a song, a part often leaps out as shorthand for the whole-- the singer's voice, the guitar tone, or a melodic phrase. As other parts come into definition over time, whatever hooked your ear first tends to stick out a little. "The Eye in the Eye of the Storm" by newcomer Lady Lazarus, a track that we reviewed last February, is a scarcer breed. From the first listen, you can take it in entirely. There's just a patiently elongated voice, a few shifting lyrics, and a C Major scale arcing up over and over. The scale begins at middle C, the eye of the keyboard, but a couple of slowly revolving chords in a lower octave create external pressure. The lyrics address the storm outside as if it were a house, "so unbearably quiet." The song's title, instrumentation, and words are all stabilized on a single conceptual base, but stability is undermined by the uneven tempo.
Appropriately for someone named after a poem, Lady Lazarus is all about the essential, a category that has not included a record label, a notable scene, or much of a public presence. I found out about her when her brother emailed me a brief "RIYL Beach House" message. I could hear some Beach House in her MySpace demos, though they reminded me more of early Cat Power or a folksier Grouper. I learned that her name was Melissa Ann Sweat; she lived in San Jose (though has since moved to Georgia) and was working on a proper album. The demos were mostly loose refrains played with a lot of feeling, wreathed in reverb and tape hiss. There was something very natural yet cloistered about the music.
I really liked the songs as they were, and worried that the hazy, magical feeling would be lost in "better" recordings. Melissa Ann Sweat had the same concern. She started to polish up Mantic, her debut LP, in a San Jose studio but found the results more "cold and clinical" than the home recordings, and she went back to her Fostex four-track. It was the right choice. She plays the atmosphere as much as the song, mostly with a reverb-drenched Yamaha electric keyboard on the grand-piano setting. On songs like "Took in My Diamond Heart", overtones gather and beat in elusive patterns around several alternating notes, and every part of the music feels responsive to the moment.
Had Sweat gone with a studio version of Mantic, some songs would've worked great. "Half-Life" and "Midnight Music for a Broken Heart Condition" fare gorgeously on the strength of Eluvium-like melodies, rather than textural accumulation. The same can't be said of "Immortal Youth", which seems mostly an excuse to try out the thumb-piano. But it makes sense in this context, where Sweat shrinks the gap between her everyday life and music to a sliver. The songs are full of places and things that were available to her: "Half-Life" was played on an upright piano in a backyard shed, "Twilight on a Steinway" in her employer's living room. People, though, are conspicuously absent: Sweat played every note. When she asks, "Who's gonna sing it but me?" on "Eye of the Storm", it doesn't feel like an idle question. Mantic thrives on the sense of being alone with the last voice in the world. Lots of people use music to try and escape their living rooms, but Lady Lazarus seems more interested in inviting us into hers.
