Album reviews

ELIZAbETH mOEN Wherever You Aren’t

ELIZABETHMOEN.COM

When Elizabeth Moen and her band rolled into the AudioTree Studios in Chicago in mid-December 2019, she had just wrapped up a whirlwind back-toback 18 shows in Italy in November following the release of two new singles, “Headgear” and “Ex’s House Party,” originally planned for her fourth album. Already looking forward to that release, Moen excitedly performed them during the AudioTree Live session along with three more new songs.

Moen had all of the preliminary tracks in consideration for the album recorded by early 2020. Then the pandemic made landfall in full force. Faced with canceling her upcoming tour, she paused the work and put out a brilliant collection of songs titled Creature of Habit, along with an additional five more singles.

Moen finally released the album with the title Wherever You Aren’t in November. In an interview with Tony Dehner of Iowa Public Radio, she explained, “I had this dream of a label, a booking agent, a manager. I kept just waiting and waiting. But then I was like, ‘Hold on!’ I have an amazing, super-supportive fan base, who have already donated to the record, who wanted to hear it. So I decided to just put it out myself! That’s what I’ve always done.”

In the same interview, she described the new, bigger sound of this record. “I kind of leveled up, I think,” which is an understatement. The early views did not prepare us for the full monty of this album.

At its core, Wherever You Aren’t is a continuation of Moen’s sweeping vocal acrobatics and the vintage tone of her trusty 1968 Gibson ES-340. She soars to heights of passion and dives to the depths of darkness—often in the same song. On “Where’s My Bike” she confesses, “I’m sick of singing songs about my exes/ Should join somebody else’s band/ Play songs about their life instead of mine/Be a part of a very marketable brand/Or I could keep wallowing all afternoon/Only think about my own problems.” The dry self-deprecating humor in “Where’s My Bike” encompasses her wit and frankness so completely that this could become her signature song.

Repeated listens reveal the attention to detail that elevates this album to her best so far. “Synthetic Fabrics,” a song that touches on the thoughts that keep her up at night, soars. At the bridge of the song, when she attempts to “bore herself to sleep,” her brain decides otherwise, plaguing her with what-if scenarios. The use of a Psycho-esque string in the mix helps portray the panic she feels.

Another excellent moment is the dramatic turn in “Emotionally Available.” The song opens as a beautiful breezy Latin soul number, adorned with a flute. The chorus swells like an approaching storm, with bombastic horns as she demands that her lover admit to her that they are not emotionally available or capable of new love. Her vocals ride this weather front—a dark, menacing monotonic turn from the pretty birdsong of the verses. This is a fascinating venture into new song territory for Moen.

Moen can be forgiven for holding Wherever You Aren’t as her offering to a label. It’s a fully realized calling card of soulful vérité examination of the day to day. Her stopand-ponder thoughts are whipped up to a creamy, dreamy soul-pop confection, the center of which is not always as sweet as it appears. But, then, the best treats are often layered.

bcJSPS

Myth Arc

BCJSPS.BANDCAMP.COM

BCJsPS Myth Arc is a collection of pieces improvised over two days in Chicago by Brian Penkrot, Justin Comer and Jason Palamara. Myth Arc is more noisy and chaotic than Comer’s last release; it combines violin, clarinet, laptop synthesis, sampled sound, hand percussion and drums in polyrhythms that shudder with energy.

These pieces aren’t that far from Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music—but this trio brings a different skill set to bear. Reed produced that work solo, setting up feedback loops between multiple guitars and amps. The interplay of three musicians makes Myth Arc a more interactive experience. The listener hears the musicians listening and responding to each other. And the listener is challenged to find the coherent whole in what seems like a collection of tattered, smashed sounds.

Comer has a Masters in Composition, and Palamara is a professor of Music Technology at Indiana University-Purdue University, but they haven’t let their academic experience limit the music they make. Jason and Justin are part of the latest wave of people coming to Iowa City to study and finding a community of like-minded players.

The BCJsPS trio play outside regular ideas of form and intentionality embedded in conventional music, finding a new, improvised structure made possible by achieving a technical peak without thinking in technical terms. “My Favorite Little Prayer” combines a recitation of a poem by Thea Brown with a slow, unsteady collection of isolated sounds. The chaotic drumming and Comer’s clarinet glissandos, combined with stuttering instruments and voices, interact with delay effects to build an echoing dub space. The saxophone “melodies”—sometimes three notes spaced out over 30 seconds—echo 1950s noir detective movie jazz soundtracks, but chopped up like confetti and thrown up in the air to see how it lands.

“Compline” is the most “Metal Machine Music” piece on Myth Arc: a continuous drone from wind instruments and what sounds like slide guitar combined with drunken glissandos. Sheets of hard-to-identify sounds weave in and out. Palamara’s amplified violin recalls John Cale’s viola on the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin.” This music is more for surrendering to than listening to.

“Zebra” combines polyrhythmic drumming with scronky violin and clarinet outbursts. It’s anti-jazz. It deliberately avoids finding any groove and replaces sophisticated harmony with atonal fragments. Yet it has formal structure, where each phrase is led off by drums, followed by violin and clarinet playing short phrases. It has a start-stop rhythm. After every phrase, they pause before inventing a new atonal outburst that ends as arbitrarily as it begins.

“Manners” samples what sounds like a 1950s educational film-strip about good manners, but structurally it’s a succession of rude interruptions. It devolves into an argument between fluttering drone notes, anti-rhythmic drums and harsh amplified violin drones. As chaotic and dense as “Manners” is, it still has a constant through line. At around 3 minutes 30 seconds, Palamara introduces a triumphant melodic figure on the violin. Very much like Indian Raga the three players stay on the major scale with a pedal tone on the root note. In the end it fades away with an acousmatic flutter of processed voices or instruments. —Kent Williams