The joy and burden of remembrance live in Mary Lattimore’s looping, layered harp music. The Los Angeles-based musician often ties her wafting music to particular places and memories, giving voice to fleeting moments. Collected Pieces II, which brings together nine tracks from Lattimore’s archive of recently recorded music, balances the softest plucks with the most powerful strums to delicately illuminate what feels like the full complexity of being.
Collected Pieces II, which follows 2020’s sparkling Silver Ladders, builds on its predecessor, even featuring a home recording of a Silver Ladders track titled “Pine Trees.” Lattimore has done something like this before; her tranquil 2017 anthology Collected Pieces served as a companion to her acclaimed 2016 album At the Dam. Her music is often assembled from long improvisational sessions that she splices into textural portraits, and these archival records present distantly related material that didn’t make it onto her full-length albums, offering another glimpse into her musical world and the memories she’s chosen to soundtrack. Some of the stories she weaves on Collected Pieces II are rooted in specific events, like “Mary You Were Wrong,” which chronicles a broken heart. Others, like “We Wave From Our Boats,” which was born out of musing on lockdown, use narrative as a jumping off point for abstract melodies that illuminate a feeling of uncertainty.
Collected Pieces II’s greatest strength lies in its nuances. The most successful tracks balance lightness and darkness, letting both unfold through intricate details. “Sleeping Deer” uses contrasting layers to showcase depth, placing a rhythmic melody on top of punchy chords and distant echoes. As in much of Lattimore’s music, the song’s melodies expand through repetition, but this time, a gravelly bass swallows a graceful melody, forming a cavernous and ominous vibration. On “Scott Kelly, Returned to Earth,” repetition takes the center stage, too, looping echoing phrases to nostalgic effect. It’s in this meticulous structuring that Collected Pieces II finds its footing.
Despite the overarching air of patterning, Collected Pieces II highlights the varying complexity of Lattimore’s music. The album’s longest piece, “Be My Four Eyes,” shifts between moods with ease instead of stacking melodies on top of each other. At times it’s colored by heart-wrenching wistfulness, other times sparkling airiness. Every moment is driven by a celestial stream of melodies that repeat so many times they begin to collide into each other, forming one glimmering mass. But when Lattimore forgoes these depths, the music starts to feel flat. The album’s weakest moments come when the music leans toward pure brightness, like on “Princess Nicotine,” which is made of high-pitched plucks that merely tread water. It’s one of the least compelling tracks, trading looping melodies and crisp texture for a twinkle that feels stuck in place.
But when Lattimore finds what’s hidden behind filmy plucks and gauzy melodies, her music shines. “There’s a special kind of vibe when you’re at a seaside town in the winter, a serenity and kind of gloominess,” Lattimore told The Quietus in 2020. That’s the feeling Collected Pieces II recalls so well—the feeling of staring out into the mist, at peace but eerily still. Collected Pieces II comes to life when murkiness collides with radiance. And in the moments when everything clouds over, there’s still some hope left to grasp.
Buy: Rough Trade
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