On her first foray into solo recording, as Mascott on the Electric Poems
EP, former Juicy songsmith Kendall Jane Meade authored a fragile set
of soft-pop pop-songs that had a slight folkie influence, her depictions
of rainy days and Mondays getting down to a downheart'd mood that
finished up amidst the home-recorded fragility of "Baby, Go Away," which
set Mascott's wavering voice and gentle acousticky strums amidst the
sound of passing traffic. For her first longplayer, she hooked up with
hot-shit producers who sculpted the sound around her, the Ladybug
Transistor's Jeffrey Baron and the renowned Diamond Jim O'Rourke knowing
enough about top tone and natty instrumentage to take Meade's
soft-heart'd tunes and dress them in all the right opulent threads.
It's taken Meade four years to make her next Mascott record, and, since
then, the Detroit native and sometime Brooklynite has returned to
Boston, it seems, putting together a "Dreamer's Book Band" comprising
players who shared her college-years college-rock roots in the Bostonian
mid-'90s. Whilst having Jim O'Rourke on board last time cast a light
of coolness on Meade that mightnt've matched her kinda dorky,
expressedly sentimental songs, this time the roped-in contributors are
much less hip, her backing-band assembled from a bunch of long-forgotten
alterna-names that the kids of today would've never heard of: Reservoir,
Varnaline, Space Needle, The Godrays, The Dambuilders. Sure, Mary
Timony — in whose band Meade once played — turns up, and the guy from Sparklehorse who produced Mary T's last longplayer, Al Weatherhead, is
behind the desk for much of Dreamer's Book. But, this time around, it's
more about the consistency of a band than it is about matching Meade's
melancholy songs with different people and differing ideas. Which means
this record is less ad-hoc, but it's also much more straight, forsaking
playful pop moments and cute studio accoutrements to dress Mascott in a
set of tasteful tunes, the gathered musicians playing pleasantly around
Meade's central songwriting with a circumspect sense of respect, I
guess.
As songsmith, Meade usually evokes the meaninglessness of most
pop-song lyrics, hoping that the syllables she sighs match melodies more
than tell stories. This album, more than her previous discs, seems
pepper'd with first-person pronouns; although, of course, this could
just be how I remember it. Even when she introduces things through the
medium of "I," Meade rarely sounds like these scenes she recalls are
autobiographical, even though it is perhaps their real-life reality that
makes her lyrics seem like abstract references to events that she
doesn't want to depict in their grim detail. For the kind of songsmith
she is, I tend to get the feeling she should be filling her songs with
all kinds of landmarks — observed images, weather, proper names of
people and places — so as to create a geography in which her lyrics are
able to live, these depicted environs razing the blandness of the
"universal" for the savagery of the specific. Of course, all this tends
not to matter so much when Meade nails a lodge-in-your-head type melody,
like on the glorious "Kite," whose chiming guitars are so charming it
matters little that the lyrics never move far from the refrain "Baby,
you're a rising kite," such an observation leading to the proffered
dreaming "wish I may, I wish you might/ fly into my bed tonight." |
