Jim Jarmusch fans would recognize Eszter Balint as the leading lady Eva in his drifting 1983 narrative Stranger than Paradise. Although her IMDb resumé includes small roles in a few other films (including Steve Buscemi's Trees Lounge), recently she has prioritized a musical career over a theatrical one. She started studying violin at the age of six, and in addition to solo albums (Mud is her second; her first, Flicker, was released in 1999), she's played violin on albums by Dayna Kurtz and Michael Gira's post-Swans project The Angels of Light.
Though she's developed in the five years since her debut, Mud remains a largely unrefined affair, with a recurring problem lying with arrangements that fail to truly mesh, resulting in songs that feel somewhat tossed together and rough around the edges. This is particularly evident on "No One", in which Balint's vocals never really sound as though they fit with the melody oozed out by her accompaniment (which includes three guitars, a French horn, keyboard, bass, drums, and glockenspiel). The song comes close to gelling during the choruses, but these are often too short and easily forgotten in the context of the rest of their respective tracks. "Good Luck" sounds like an updated version of Luscious Jackson's "Naked Eye", with Balint cramming bland lyrics ("Will you chew me up, spit me out in the end/ Just when I think you're my friend") into four minutes. Notably, this is the only song on which she doesn't play anything.
Mud isn't always shaky, though. Balint's strongest songs seem to be the ones on which she plays violin: With an instrument on which she's so obviously comfortable, she's able to fill in any of the awkward spaces in her arrangements. On the opening track, "Pebbles & Stones", Balint sounds more relaxed than on most of the rest of the album, both vocally and musically. The banjo, played by Mud's producer JD Foster, gives the song an alt-country feel, yet the lack of twang in Balint's coarse alto, which at times too closely mirrors that of PJ Harvey, saves it from sounding derivative, and her violin swoops in to smooth out her rough instrumental transitions.
The harshness of Balint's voice fits well with the despair that often lies in her lyrics: "Your God is sick, your God's a joke/ The lovely tales and songs a pile of shit," she sings on "Your God". She doesn't ever really sound angry, though, which is to her credit: Her voice wouldn't easily lend itself to inharmonious wailing. While the opening of the album's final song, the piano-driven "Who Are You Now", comes strikingly close to a Sarah McLachlan intro, its slow tempo allows Balint to reveal more emotion than on her other songs, as she bemoans the betrayal of a lover ("I opened this drawer, found a hotel room key.../ Wish I'd taken a picture of the dent on my chest/ You left when you buried your head there to rest").
Again, Balint's soulful violin complements both her vocal melody and the instrumentation, and she closes the album on a strong (albeit melancholy) note. Even though a few of her songs don't quite gel, Balint shows promise as a songwriter, and with the strength of her violin-playing, her arrangements will surely improve as she grows more comfortable with performing.
