Alina Simone lives in Brooklyn but was born in Ukraine, a fact that her work tends to confront either directly or not at all. There was the 2008 album Everyone is Crying Out to Me, Beware, where Simone covered songs by the Siberian folk-punk singer Yanka Dyagileva. There is Simone's new memoir, You Must Go and Win, which addresses "the lure of a mythical Russian home" she left as an infant as well as the foibles of the American music industry. And on her new album, Make Your Own Danger, there's a song about Baba Yaga, the legendary Slavic witch whose house walks around on chicken legs. Under its gypsy veneer, it reminds me a bit of the Smashing Pumpkins' "Disarm", which is telling.
The American music business can be a precarious place for homegrown artists with foreign roots, and Simone has generally seemed leery of fetishizing her heritage for American markets. She seems to deploy her background with a mixture of personal interest and business savvy. On Make Your Own Danger, Eastern European folk tropes are pretty scarce, and mainly function as a bit of marketable window dressing for the music Simone really seems to love, vintage alt-rock. This is someone who gave her 2005 debut EP the supremely "1990s" title of Prettier in the Dark, and who inherits a tradition that PJ Harvey defined in the 90s and Shannon Wright carried on in the 2000s: strong, intense women with smoldering voices set to melodious yet slashing music. Simone may dream of that mythical Ukrainian home, but she expresses herself in the language of crunchy rhythm guitars, chiming leads, and confessional vocals that has soundtracked her American life.
In the beginning, Simone was more like these artists in sound than spirit-- there was something tentative about her earliest efforts. But Make Your Own Danger betrays a growing assertiveness. Its bedrock of coffeehouse singer/songwriter fare and lean, propulsive rock gains distinction and variety with the addition of chamber instruments and hand percussion. It still has the delicate rawness that is central to Simone's music, but with more layers of arrangement than ever before. The flute on "Apocalyptic Lullaby" offsets the lumbering doom-folk with welcome lightness, and "Glitterati", whose hovering percussion and guitars surprisingly evoke the Walkmen, is one of the most striking songs we've heard from Simone to date-- to say nothing of the Velvet Underground-derived trance she conjures on "You Fade Away" or the effortlessly gorgeous ballad "Just Here to Watch the Show".
Her voice has gotten more formidable too. There are a couple of songs where she's a little smaller in the mix than would seem ideal: "Day Glow Avenue" represents the record at its most polite. But for the most part, her singing is both forceful and subtle. It draws out the nuances of lyrics that are full of sinister but deflected evocations of some beautiful oblivion. Pivotal events lurk around every corner here, before and behind, seldom revealed. As someone who seems to always be on the verge of blowing up, that must be a feeling Simone knows well. Maybe her unwillingness to go all in as an American classic or Eastern European curiosity hasn't ingratiated her with a marketplace that likes tidy narratives, and maybe she's getting a little fed up with it. When a shotgun goes off in the harbor on "Gunshots", you can hear the bang in her voice.
