Jenny Toomey, indie-rock luminary that she is, has come a long way as both artist and interlocutor since Tsunami's final album, 1997's A Brilliant Mistake. She left her Simple Machines label to begin the Future of Music Coalition, putting herself in the precarious situation of being an devoted artist with no time for art. Somewhere in the midst of these four years was catastrophic love-- a heartbreak so tragic and special it warranted a double-disc. Both her pedigree and tendency for advice date her; these are not the tales of a wide-eyed youth. Yet, where time almost invariably wears on musicians, leaving them without so much as a shred of inspiration or cultural relevance, Toomey has remarkably managed the unmanageable: she's aged while maintaining her grace.
Antidote's 16 tracks range between bitter ("Patsy Cline") to resigned ("When You Get Cold"), and borrow some of the best talent offered by the two cities each of these discs respectively represent: Chicago and Nashville. The Chicago disc features not the first names that come to mind when you think of the city, but arguably more interesting ones in these post-post-rock days: engineer and ex-Pulsars member David Trumfio, Trip Grey on drums, super-cellist Amy Domingues, Aluminum Group frontman John Navin, Drag City crooner Edith Frost, and violinist Andrew Bird (of Bowl of Fire fame). Nashville artists Jean Cook and Lambchop member Mark Nevers (who has also engineered albums for Leann Rimes and Vic Chesnutt) fill out the lap-steel and slow, caramel-drip sadness of the Nashville disc.
The Nashville selections languish in the inflection of lost love. Long legatos, brushes, and sprinkles of piano color Toomey's ruminations, her voice recalling the punctuation of Natalie Merchant and the lilt of Sam Prekop-- full and strong without the sense of virtuosity that could ruin its context. By the third track, "The Smell of Him," Toomey has proven the strength of her moodsetting; the song oozes style with soft angles and upright bass. The steel-laden "Artful Dodger" takes the most chances of these songs. Toomey's vocals fall outside the beat, her melody picked above the slow procession of chords. It's a strange, Verve-like moment of violin tremolo and stylized country made all the stranger by Toomey's lyrics, unrhymed, articulate and serious.
The Chicago disc packs up the sad strains and sends them off on defiant bursts of horn, beating them with dance rhythms and washes of distortion. It opens with "Patsy Cline," a tongue-in-cheek advice column for ladies who love their pre-modern men. "Clear Cut" takes the borderline-cliché metaphor of doing away with love entirely and remodels it. And "Breezewood P.A." pulls Toomey's cynicism to the fore with the opening lines, "If I took advice from editors of certain teenage magazines that dictate style for teenage scenes and guidelines for romance/ I'd surely speak with more reserve on certain sparks." All this in a showtune-style bed whose nuances call to mind Jim O'Rourke's willfully commercial pop solo work.
This disc almost seems a response to a questioning of her musical intent. She answers by allowing her crew to convert simply good songs into great ones. The band employs their greatest tricks-- Domingues' crescendos, which bend into subtly hooked guitar lines, are particularly affecting-- and the engineers mix songs like "Charm City" with sassy drop-outs and explosive horn sections.
When Toomey presented these new songs at Ladyfest Chicago, she explained that, "They could all fit on one disc, space-wise, but really shouldn't be together stylistically at all. Don't think I'm ambitious because I took two." Though her songwriting remains characteristic, the treatment given by each pack of musicians is worlds (if only time-zones) apart. If Nashville breathes deeper than Chicago, it's simply because Toomey's strength is her weakness, that her greatest lines aren't windy-city comebacks so much as those questioning the sincerity of love in the land of music.
