In his 2004 book Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture, Aaron Fox assessed the role of the human voice—as a sounding instrument and carrier of dialect—in country music’s history as a “working-class” genre. His fieldwork was conducted in the early 1990s; a few years later, Auto-Tune would complicate his questions of authenticity. But for experimental musician Mari Rubio, the human voice’s relationship to technology is an endless source of creative potential. On her latest album as more eaze, she reconstructs country and folk idioms, incorporating them into textural compositions that meditate on the spatial disconnect between her new environment in New York and her old home in San Antonio, Texas (incidentally, a few towns over from the Lockhart honky-tonks where Fox researched).
With quivering electronics, poignant Auto-Tuned vocal fragments, and wailing pedal steel, sentence structure in the country flips the assumption that technology and authenticity have to be opposed, asserting the expressivity of the electronically mediated voice. While 2024’s lacuna and parlor featured the voice as an accessory to longer, loping ambient compositions, Rubio brings her delicate vocals to the front of the mix here. On “distance,” she lingers on certain notes, the quantized, clean tone of her voice harmonizing with smooth contours of pedal steel peeking up like the dorsal fin of a whale rising above the waterline.
Where a classic country singer might incorporate a cry break to literalize their broken heart, Rubio’s wavering Auto-Tune sketches out the haunting effects of relationship trauma: “If you only knew why I lock the doors/You’d say it’s illogical/And I’d say of course,” she almost whispers on “leave (again),” surrounded by bubbly tones that slide and disappear amid snatches of vinyl crackle. Her songwriting exudes a quiet poise compared to the diaristic songs of luv+h8, released in 2023 after her move to New York. She’s still looking to the past and sifting through memories, but there’s a sense that she’s letting go of old regrets: “When I was seated on the plane/I struggled not to cry/When I see you once again/It didn’t make a difference,” she croons on “move,” above a synth progression that feels at the cusp of lifting off.
As central as Rubio’s voice is on this record, contributions from her musical community in New York add to her sputtering electronics and violin drones. Ryan Sawyer’s virtuosic drumming shows up as timbral ornamentation that grounds the weightless electronic production: Listen to his gentle snare rolls on tracks like “crunch the numbers” and the monumental “biters,” gesturing at a sonic topography without being overbearing. The title track feels like a hero’s journey in miniature, beginning with a wind-blasted synth that’s joined by various eccentric party members. Jade Guterman’s acoustic guitar crawls in on all fours, with Alice Gerlach’s squeaking, stuttering cello and Wendy Eisenberg’s electric guitar harmonics following soon after, tracing an arc from cold desolation to sun-splashed transcendence.
The best moment of the record comes on “the producer,” when Rubio turns off the Auto-Tune and brings the mic even closer for a reflexive indie-folk anthem about creative labor in the attention economy. She’s dabbled in poppier songwriting before, but here she gives one of her most compelling vocal performances, brittle yet substantial. Luscious strings and banjo swell around her: “When the spittle seeps through the membrane/You’ve got a problem, the .wavs won’t transform your pain,” she ends the chorus in a sudden dissonant descent. A metronomic blip keeps rhythm, laying bare the songwriting process in the lyrics. It’s as if, in the age of AI-generated voices and melodies, she’s trying to lay claim to authentic feeling by painting a behind-the-scenes picture of how it’s all made.
