Picking up where we left off: I've decided that my crush on the mayor's wife has something to do with the mayor's being an Ivy Leaguer. My attraction to her is, gulp, rooted in the way her gruff composure silently upbraids his foppish kewpie-dollness. Another loose end: I think the frenzied dreams about mannequin-luvin' are based on anxiety about needing new clothes, instead of the myriad less reputable interpretations. Incidentally, I hope you don't think it's rude that I don't ask how you are doing; it just always struck me as insane, when I snuck reads of others' diaries, that they began, "Dear Diary, hope this finds you well?", etc.
So I've got to review a Cynthia Dall CD for Pitchforkmedia.com, that e-zine that is fast becoming a cultural monolith as bristling with flash and bias as Fox News. I'm torn, Diary. You see, I dig her other work, but this... not so much. And it's on Drag City, a label so singularly wily, foxy, hip, outré, and haute that I find myself allotting their releases a different kind of attention than I would, say, a release from Atlantic. If Matador and Merge are the Monitor and Merrimack of big indie labels... well, I don't know where that leaves Sub Pop, since Washington wasn't a state during the Civil War. Okay, new time period: Drag City is like H.L. Mencken, a lovable pariah, a smug beacon of intelligence and contrarianism, even though Mencken was from Baltimore which ruins the geographical thing I had going with the Northern Matador and the Southern Merge. The point is, I feel a pressure to wink knowingly at Drag City releases, to which I'll admit extending a kind of insecure sympathy. I remember pretending I didn't hate Flying Saucer Attack's Distant Station, and even feigning that I "got" King Kong, huh-huh.
So basically I suck? But maybe, Diary, I was caught in the pull of Drag City's communal, give-us-a-hand-here vibe; the label is (yes, another analogy) a veritable Brook Farm (K Records being the Branch Davidian compound) where everybody helps everybody and where all the crime scenes contain the leavings of an O'Rourke, or a Murphy, or a Hagerty. Dall herself first surfaced as a kind of "lovely assistant" to Smog's Bill Callahan. Her distinctive guitar work (a top-heavy, distorted, amateurish staccato attack that strikes back and forth from chord X to chord Y unchangingly) is easy to spot, and she did vocals on at least three releases, ending around The Doctor Came at Dawn in 1996.
That year, Dall released Untitled, on which she was accompanied by Jim O'Rourke and Smog. The record was a fascinating slab of curdling darkness, and Dall came across as playfully bitchy with a hint of the sinister. No hipster's yuletide mix is complete without the song on which Dall repeats, over music that sounds like the test tube baby of The Exorcist and Halloween soundtracks, "What are you buying me for Christmas?/ It better be good." The album was soilingly fun, like being tickled with a bloody feather.
Sound Restores Young Men, though, is frustratingly primitive, and thus monochromatic, which is a shame because Dall's had six years to work on her guitar. And except for when she actually emotes on "Nest of Dead Children", or when she calls to mind Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons-era Blonde Redhead on the great, tumultuous, eight-minute "Snakeblood and Vodka", her distant voice sounds like a flatter Juliana Hatfield, or maybe Frente! girl Angie Hart if she was a Yank on downers, or maybe soda brat Hallie Eisenberg auditioning for Ophelia's hey-nonny-nonny freakout scene.
Some of the fragile waif stuff here might be a reflection of the back cover's note that the album is a "study of a young woman struck mute after witnessing her mother's murder," but that may be a tease, since the packaging is covered in similar random bits a la the kings of cut-n-paste-n-scribble, (Drag City scions) Pavement. Incisive and divisive lyrics, like Untitled's about hating her body, are fewer and farther between here, though she gets a few good accusatory jabs in, such as this one from the jealous anthem "The Party": "When you talk about her, I feel as if I'd been in her myself." Dall careens from moments of precise imagery to patches of vague talk that recall, well, diary entries.
So Diary, I reckon that in the Pitchfork piece I'll just say something that sounds totally objective, like, "Despite its pedigree, this album's spook-chick tone is very early 90s, very drama club doyenne, very Tori Amos and Throwing Muses." I won't mention the mayor's wife or the mannequins, or anything that would fuel some "I'm intimidated by aloof femininity" double-standard argument. I'll just hope no one points out comparatively hypocritical stances I've taken on other minimalist mid-fi outings. God, I can still hear my third wife saying, as she was packing her bags, that my bookshelf lacked proper representation of women and that how that was "a metaphor for our skylab," "our skylab" already being her metaphor for our relationship's arc of enthusiasm, then eventless orbit, then choreographed plummet.
I dutifully played Cynthia Dall's Untitled on the way to purchase bookshelf-democratizing tomes by Lydia Davis, Mary Robison, and Wislawa Szymborska. How's this for a last sentence, Diary, you truest and most charitable consort: "Sound Restores Young Men is fundamentally hampered by production that reduces Dall's role, on her own damn platter, to performing backup vocal duties for a lead track that was never lain down." And if people write to say the review was annoying, I'll say 'twas a case of critic emulating subject.
