On a record filled with shards of narrative and differing "voices" and numerous recurring characters, Khaela Maricich shows herself t'be quite the character, characterized by going by the name of The Blow, her blow dealing a Concussive Caress that's a hit felt like a kiss, with this disc spun off from a performative post-modernist pop opera — "Blue Sky v. Night Sky" — she once took on tour for audiences who may or may not've been confused. It's been the year for operatics from the K krew, starting with the monument of the Microphones' Mount Eerie and winding on down, through associative idiosyncratic antics from lone-wolf types like Little Wings and [[[[VVRSSNN]]]] and Anna Oxygen and Dennis Driscoll and Mirah and even cap'n Calvin himself. All these folk represent, if anything, an extrapolation on the idea of the artist as individual, and the individuality of their self-styled stylings makes wandering through a record like Casey Caught Her Mom Singing Along With the Vacuum a disconcerting journey through the firing synapses of some other human's mind. And I just love Khaela's brain, the way short-sighted ideas get long-minded over the pupative stages of artistic conception, and love even more the way the gestation of these long-gathered narratives goes with musicality, which often seems to have the shortest of attention spans. Maricich is more conceptualist than musician, and her disc is a story told in super-short parts whose instrumentation is fragmented, like each choice was made by the grabbing of stuff in ad-hoc fashion. Whilst her voice holds the narrative thread with its presence — and, such said, even that notion is proven nominal by the instrumentalist bonus tracking that comes post-opera as post-script — the musical accompaniment hardly unspools with continuous flow. There're beat-boxes and Casio-tones and drum-loops here, rock-guitars and hand-claps and melodica there, but they're rarely gathered into any arrangement that goes beyond rudimentary, and they're often pulled away completely to concentrate on the voices that're always at the performances' center.
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