There's the voice, and then there's the room it was recorded in, the microphone used, the amount and type of reverb added, and the intricacies of the mix. Add together these and a dozen other variables and you arrive at a record's vocal presence. It can be dry and straight, like the singer is in the room and singing just for you. Or it can be processed to sound like a transmission from a dream. Every era of music has recording trends that fix a particular voice in time.
Yvonne Cornelius, the German singer behind Niobe, seems to have a thing for vocal presence. The 13 songs on her album White Hats vary in mood and color, some going for a light and acoustic bossa nova feel, while others glance at darker electronic abstraction. But the way she records, layers, and treats her voice is what really separates one song from the next. Each of the tracks has an ambience derived from the particulars of how her voice sounds; even when details of the song are forgettable, the character of her voice stays with you.
"Well and Wise" is at the impressionist end of the spectrum, as Cornelius doubles her voices and runs one take through an odd filter, which lends a mechanistic feel to her trilling neo-gospel phrasing. Behind her is little but space, just a few notes plucked on a bass and the barest hint of percussion every bar or two, and the stark accompaniment brings her warped, robotic tone into sharp relief. It's reminiscent of Jamie Lidell's experiments, the way familiar uses of the most human of instruments are bent and tweaked by computer to arrive at something alien. The less striking "Phosphorous" has a similar effect but with more fleshy instrumentation, this time some heavily reverbed guitar walking adds a David Lynch meets Santo & Johnny quality.
"Surround Your Hover" is comparatively straight but still heavily stylized, aiming for a Brazilian feel with the plucked acoustic and shuffling beat. Here, and on the nylon acoustic-only "The Hills", with her singing left alone, Cornelius exhibits good instincts for jazzy pop phrasing, bending notes and slipping behind the beat to good effect. "In the Sun" references a different past, the soaking wet, echoplexed sound of the early to mid 60s favored by Lee Hazlewood, with Cornelius channeling Peggy Lee.
As the tracks jump in style from one to the next, from the dank and gothic dungeon setting of the title track to the silky, club-ready r&b of the closing "Cool Alpine", you have to admire Cornelius' imagination for sound and ability to bring together so many different worlds on one record. On the other hand, none of these cleverly constructed tracks really jump out and demand to be played again. As songs, ultimately, they're just OK. And when you think of the associations and moods embedded in the way a voice is recorded, the old records that survived and endured to be listened to at another time did so because they were also great songs. Too much of White Hats, impressive as it can be, feels like an exercise.
