Collecting covers, B-sides, remixes, do-overs, and other odds and ends from the past year, Heavy Ghost Appendices sounds less like back-of-the-book material than marginalia-- doodles and notes DM Stith had made to the original texts. These 22 tracks are cross-outs and corrections, revealing the different iterations of his songs as well as a general idea that his songs are never set or settled. That mercurial aspect of Stith's music is not a little surprising, considering the obvious care and thought that goes into each of his arrangements. Appendices caps a particularly fruitful period for the graphic designer turned musician, who culled the tracklist from a series of digital EPs released throughout 2009. Yet, it seems best to think of everything up to this point as one sovereign work, an ongoing album released piecemeal: Each song not only emanates from the same otherworldly perspective and conjures the same spectral ambience, but comments on the others, echoing sounds and lyrical phrases.
On the first disc of Appendices, Stith is the active creative agent, determining the snaky arrangements and sustaining that eerie mood across a dozen tracks. "Around the Lion Legs", a standout from the Curtain Speech EP, appears here as a "slow dance version," moving much more slowly and muting that cascade of voices that gave the original its peculiar power. Likewise, the "brass version" of "Braid of Voices" adorns one of the best songs from Heavy Ghost with soft horns that form curlicues of sound in the background. As standalone tracks, they pale slightly to their "finished versions," but as rough drafts, they offer intriguing glimpses of paths not taken and reveal Stith's careful editorial eye. His take on the Ronettes' oft-covered "Be My Baby" unbricks that wall of sound and reduces the song to a wet-blanket study in easy reinterpretation, but his version of Randy Newman's stalker drama "Suzanne" is perhaps the comp's best moment, as Stith insinuates himself into the song's blues structure with startling ease and into the title character's life without losing any of the dark humor. For an artist who rarely comes across as spontaneous, the cover sounds remarkably well read, turning his typically warm ambience into something much more menacing.
By contrast, on the second disc Stith is largely just another instrument, his voice another sound to be manipulated and his arrangements another object to be carefully deconstructed and reassembled. The remixers, including Michna, Son Lux, Clark, and Rafter, prove less adventurous than Stith himself. Rather than break the spells of his songs, they simply reconstruct or augment them, offering few dramatic interpretations. There are some nice flourishes, such as the mildly funky drumbeat on Michna's rethinking of "Thanksgiving Moon". Bibio's clattery remix of "Abraham's Song" stands out by undercutting Stith's soft vocals with jarring beats that barely hold to the beat, as if the whole song could crumble in on itself. Similarly, New Jersey singer-songwriter Dayna Kurtz covers "Thanksgiving Moon" as if it were a from-the-ground-up remix, recasting it as a jazzy torch song that is earthy rather than ethereal but shows just how malleable these songs can be when wholly removed from their original settings. Of course, no one knows or practices that better than Stith himself.
