Pick up any Elephant 6 record worth a damn, and chances are you'll find Music Tapes frontman Julian Koster's name somewhere in the liner notes. For going on 20 years, Koster's been instrumental in shaping the sound of Elephant 6's sprawling psychedelia, lending his singing saw (and his considerable compositional expertise) to Neutral Milk Hotel and the Olivia Tremor Control, to his own Chocolate USA and the Music Tapes. Though the weird whinny of Koster's favored axe and his symphony-on-a-shoestring arrangements are nearly as essential to the E6 sound as their thousand-part harmonies, his work as the Music Tapes has occasionally struggled to distinguish itself from the company he keeps. The group-- Koster, multi-instrumentalist Robbie Cucchiaro, and a rotating cast of E6 regulars-- debuted in 1999 with the maddeningly scattershot 1st Imaginary Symphony for Nomad, a particularly dizzying spin on the Elephant 6 house style. Their second official release, 2008's Music Tapes for Clouds and Tornadoes, settled out out some of the earlier stuff's more addled arrangements, drawing on Koster's love of American pastorals. Good as Clouds and Tornadoes was, though, Koster's never quite set himself apart as a songwriter the way some of his good friends and contemporaries have. Unless you're ankle-deep in E6, you probably best know Koster as a utility man, a bit player, "the dude with the singing saw."
Running an impressive gamut between stark confessionals and sepia-toned Stephen Foster fantasia, the new Mary's Voice is a grand, genre-straddling vision in sound; on strictly musical terms, it's the most accomplished Music Tapes LP to date. Woozy opener "The Dark Is Singing Songs (Sleepy Time Down South)" is a Disneyfied lullaby dirge that seems to arrive about a century past its born-on date. The fairly self-explanatory "Saw and Calliope Organ on Wire" follows, an instrumental piece that sounds like the way a yellowed photo of Coney Island looks. This time-travel effect is slightly unsettling, like a letter to your grandmother-- or, perhaps, the postcard that inspired your favorite record cover-- falling out of an old book. Mary's Voice is interspersed with church bells, ambient whatsits, otherworldly saw interludes, even a brief intermission. Koster's knack for putting sounds together certainly hasn't gone uncommented upon over the years, but here, he's not simply stringing together a few dozen parts. In Mary's Voice's, he and Cucchiaro have created a eerily beautiful little world unto itself.
This being an Elephant 6 record, Koster cuts the instrumental rigamarole with a smattering of proper songs along the folk-psych continuum. These tunes are sharply composed, if a bit slippery on subject matter; there's a whole backstory to Mary's Voice, with Mary, something about whales, and the melody of "Playing 'Evening'", but how much any of that actually matters seems to be left up to the listener. Koster's voice isn't what you'd call classically beautiful, but it's sweet, and expressive, and possessed with a solemn optimism that-- when coupled with his fondness for the pump organ-- draws to mind everybody from Daniel Johnston to Phil Elverum. Still, it's Koster's old friend and bandmate Jeff Mangum himself who looms largest over Koster's songwriting this time around. Though Mangum's actual role in Mary's Voice is tough to locate-- he's credited with both "turntable manipulation" and "chair," which, well-- there's more than a bit of him in the urgent strums and vocal up-and-over of "Playing 'Evening'" and "To All Who Say Goodnight" and especially closer "Takeshi and Elijah".
Koster's got as much right to claim a Mangum influence as anybody, but here on Mary's Voice, he doesn't so much borrow from Mangum as channel him. You could easily take the stark, deeply felt "Takeshi" as a spiritual cousin of sorts to Aeroplane's astonishing finale, "Two Headed Boy Pt. 2.": Koster, addressing a seldom-seen friend, talks up their "musical bands that toured through the land," and it hardly even seems a stretch to think the "sweet, snowy tune" is Mangum's semen-stained "Communist Daughter". "Takeshi" is a song of encouragement, acknowledging the past while casting an optimistic eye toward the future. It's not hard to read as a sort of state of the union address for Elephant 6 that feels particularly poignant in the wake of Mangum's recent return to the road and this summer's passing of the Olivia Tremor Control's Bill Doss.
This time out, the songs themselves are less restless, less prone to distracting themselves, but there are enough hard turns and fidelity shifts between the peculiar orchestrations and Koster's somewhat strangled vocals on the stripped-back songs that the effect can be a bit decentering. Even with the strides he's made as a songwriter in the few years since Clouds and Tornadoes, the more ornately composed stuff here is, "Takeshi" aside, more distinctive than the songs themselves. Still, this is an album's album: prismatic, ornate, never wanting for ambition. A song or two here and there might falter a bit, but taken as a whole, Mary's Voice is a minor triumph.
After years of quietly rooting for the guy, I went into Mary's Voice hoping Koster would use the record to find his own. I realize now I'd been looking in the wrong places. Koster plays well with others; that much we've known all along. And he, more than most, has always seemed particularly attuned to the collective goals of E6; this is, after all, the guy who sold his banjo from the Aeroplane sessions so he and his buddies could go on tour. So if the best moments on Mary's Voice find him surrounded by-- and occasionally channeling-- his old pals, well, that's almost to be expected. Koster's always been quite good at making himself heard, he just happens to be at his loudest when joined in chorus-- real or imaginary-- with his old friends, to lend his talents to something bigger, more communal. You won't find that little logo anywhere on the record, but the detour-prone, profoundly odd, unstuck in time Mary's Voice is an Elephant 6 record through and through. Koster, with a little help from his friends, made this one worth a damn.
