Five years after making their prettiest, most accomplished, most
fleshed-out album, Who Shot Elvis?, Mecca Normal return from
the discographical wilderness, returning back to the belligerent
skin-and-bones ways they once worked in, returned to the essentialist
skeletal duo of Jean Smith and David Lester. That's not to say that
there isn't prettiness here. Opener "Is This You?" starts things off
with a certain kind of sweetness. "No Mind's Eye" finds Lester
fingerpicking in almost Nick Drake-like autumnal ways and even
multitracks Smith's sneering vocals to actually cultivate harmony.
And, then, the set's centerpiece, its eight-minute title track, is,
well, if not pretty, certainly possessing a sweet melody to go with
the savage beauty of Smith's words, which are delivered, in their
half-spoken/half-sung ways, a little more circumspectly than normal
Mecca Normal singing. Such savagely beautiful words find Smith
crossing intimate lines as she makes magic out of the mundane, airing
family laundry and cultivating an air of profound art. At other
times, they return to confrontational distortion, the muddied sounds
of fuzzied guitar harking back to the sounds on which they hung
Smith's barrage of verbiage in their haranguing youth. Smith has
grown much more accomplished over the years, though, at getting the
words to fit with the music, and, on cuts like "What About The Boy?,"
she manipulates syllables and phrases with expert ease, shaping
spoken/sneered sounds, and the images they convey, into expressive
pirouettes that circle Lester's cyclical rhythmic patterns. This is a
perfect example of the way Mecca Normal's songs often "gather" over
their tenure, picking up momentum and sentiments and expression along
the way.
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