voxpoptart's Full Review: Homewreckcordings * by Rebecca Moore
It can be a bad idea to assume too much from an album’s graphic design. For Rebecca Moore’s second album, Home Wreckordings, the lyrics to seven of the songs are hand-printed by Rebecca herself in the shapes of animals, including three differently-posed horsies and a kittycat (although also, to be sure, a beetle, a bat, and a skull). The thank-yous gush their way from “I luv you ursula+dan+hanky” to “scratchy: thanks always, for everything, always, and thank you so much michael almereyda, for helicopters and inspiration”, with an “xxxdxxx” in the middle somewhere. It’s not that I doubt her sincerity – she’s probably a darling, she seems to have lots of friends, and her patchy debut Admiral Charcoal’s Coat included a very touching tribute to her Dad – it’s that you’d be led seriously astray in imagining her music. Noticing that she’s on the Knitting Factory label might get you closer if you know their work: they specialize in releasing very odd music that I’m told has been filed in European record stores as “Jazz Not Jazz”. But Knitting Factory acts tend to be instrumental ensembles, and Rebecca is a singer/ songwriter and pure solo artist. That her records come out stranger than anything by Bjork, more unsettling than Cat Power or Lisa Germano: that’s what the package doesn’t tell you.
Her singing is in some senses conventionally good, with the clarity and enunciation of a Broadway ballad singer, and a few girlish quirks to color her low-alto pitch. The impression it leaves me, though, is less professional and more personal. She picks her way carefully among the words and notes, and her wavery voice sometimes catches up to the correct note mid-syllable. Only now and then does her intensity modify itself to the words, and she reminds me of a karaoke singer trying very hard to convey a song that’s very important to her, all the while fighting stagefright and the doubt that she’s memorized the words in the right order. The first three songs even feel to me as though she’d sung them alone into air, adding the music only later – and such is Rebecca’s focus that I would listen happily to all three in voice-only form, if asked to. The actual recordings are more striking yet.
“Stiletto’d Young Stars”, the opener, was nearly my choice for Best Song of 2001. It’s surprisingly simple in construction. Her voice weaves in and out of the silences between repetitions of a tense melody built from a violin, a cello, and a very distinct line of feedback; the instrumental melody modulates to higher keys and inverts and re-orders itself; a later section adds a synthesizer that rings like a bell from a damp, dark cave; by the end she’s cutting against her own flattened vocal harmonies. “Stiletto’d Young Stars” doesn’t happen to sound like anything else in the world, and it’s powerful enough to completely remove me from any worldly distractions, conversations, concerns, pains, or needed amputations ongoing while it plays. But it’s not complicated.
“This / Past”’s odd tunings may involve the Japanese stringed instrument called the koto (or not), but it's just that, some intensive care ward beeping, some distant excavations, and some more cello around Rebecca’s vocals; Thom Yorke could have sung it for Radiohead’s recent albums. Her vocal auto-harmonies on “Thaw” are pestered by ray-guns and a lumbering bass march like Frankenstein’s garbage disposal turning against its maker, and I’m reminded of Miranda Sex Garden, the only madrigal-singing a capella act ever recorded to the world’s leading industrial music label, and one who happily got to building weirder soundscapes than most of their Mute Records labelmates. “Live in Blue Sparks” is like the blurry remnant of a P.J. Harvey song that someone hasn’t scrubbed hard enough to erase. The instrumental “Spectral Vapor in the Neural Machine” is the “Treefingers” of the album, I guess, piano plinks and water noise and atmospherics to relax and cleans the palette.
When “Cartoon Lust” starts, it suddenly becomes clear that Rebecca has worked a slick structural trick here. Taken out of context, I suspect “Cartoon Lust” would register for its half-submerged vocals, its White Stripes’ Elephant-style of distortion, and its Middle Eastern tunings – but we’ve had five tracks to get used to Home Wreckordings, and what stands out is the strength of the off-beat drumming, the taunting confidence of the singing, the rhythmic force of the violin: “Cartoon Lust” is a dance song. It’s like how Radiohead’s “There There” becomes, to reviewers and fans, a “catchy single” and a “return to the sound of the Bends” – which makes zero sense if you actually listen to singles, or to the Bends, along with “There There”. People who say “There There” is catchy have been blinded to the real world. But the real world has the remains of Guns’n’Roses decide that, sick of having the selfish, unreliable, star-tripping Axl Rose, they should work with someone totally different: like Scott Weiland of the Stone Temple Pilots. You don’t want to be there.
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“Somehow”, by this point, is a breathy folk dance, a lilting melody and swinging fake snares (at least by comparison) joined by spooky marimba and odd whooshing (objectively). “Joy Will Come a.k.a. Joe Will Cum” is a lovely xylophone ballad too fragile not to tear anywhere else, except maybe a Bjork cd. The instrumental “Forest at Night”, piano and strings and classical guitar, is slow and moving.
Near the end of the album, we’ve even got a cover of Earth Wind and Fire’s “Fantasy”. Admittedly this is the sort of cover version that makes me think the more aggressive phrase “smother version” needs to be coined, but Rebecca’s vocal sections are recognizable from their funk/soul origins, parts of the horn section are faithfully transcribed for rusty swingset, and the optimism fights to a draw with dense percussion that suggests Trent Reznor writing the score for SimJunkyard. And maybe I can’t see outside context even with effort, but I’m _almost_ certain that closing track “Sister Marianne” is a genuinely pop piano-and-strings song, suited for the Broadway crowd but adaptable for fans of Suzanne Vega or Tori Amos or, heck, late Beatles.
And you know, it beats me whether this sounds appealing. It beats me whether you’ll see any poetry in her equally-odd words, if you can picture, say
“I go dripping down Rivington Street to the shattered field of jars.
I watch the rise and fall of this town,
I’ve got bells on every limb to alert my next of kin.”
I don’t know if you can find the start of a relationship song in
“It starts, a simple melody... I let it slip away.
If the song was meant to be, it’ll come again someday, like you.
Fellow sun, in time you’ll be wasted, for now let’s wander the graphite meadows cold”
and the encouragement in “The trumpets of your soul will blow”. I can’t make you sit through the first five tracks and let them re-orient your heartbeat and decelerate your flickering attentions. Do you like any music that seems initially bizarre – be it as relevant as Radiohead or Bjork or bootleg tapes of Kristin Hersh's collaborations with the dead composer Charles Ives, or as far-removed as Mars Volta or the Stooges or Ornette Coleman? Can you remember the exhiliration of those first few listens, the amazed feeling that you have no idea what is happening but maybe it’ll turn out to be awesome? That's what I mean here.
I could tell you that I personally like Rebecca Moore’s Home Wreckordings _better_ than Post or Kid A or Hersh’s Hips and Makers. And your sanest response is to shrug and take my word for it (especially since I'm cheating: Kid A is hardly my favorite Radiohead album). Still, I’d much rather have one or more of you say “You’ve got to be kidding, moron!”, and buy Moore’s album just to listen a few times and prove I’m out of my freaking skull. Because maybe I am. But I got good company escorting me there, and we're up for sharing.
****
Thanks to lambchops for putting this in the database. She's ridiculously co-operative about stuff like that; this is like the fifth or sixth review of mine she's made possible. Cheers!)
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