Tara Jane ONeil, a songwriter familiar with working with the physical
tools of an artist, described the process of making — or finishing, more
like — her latest album as akin to making a quilt: stitching together
bits and pieces fashioned from differing fabrics at different points of
time, and hoping to make something functionally whole from such. It was
the same way she assembled her first solo disc, Peregrine — though debuts tend to be like that, don't they — and the same way she assembled her recent off-cuts collection Bones — though discs compiled as such tend to be like that, don't they — yet, to her, this needle-and-thread
assemblage felt new all over. On the gloriously-monikered You Sound,
Reflect, the Louisvillian wanderer, currently calling Portland, Oregon,
home, settles down with a down-home collection of songs exploring her
narcotic outsider-Americana. Her fourth proper solo longplayer is a
distillation of recent dabblings, gathering threads she'd drawn out at
length — the drum-machine thunk and rudimentary loops of TJO TKO, the instrumentalist scene-music of Music for a Meteor Shower, the stripped-down sketches of Bones — all together on a disc that reels these back towards the particular, personal sound she wove on her first
two solo discs, Peregrine and In the Sun Lines.
It still is that metaphorical quilt, of course, with differing artistic
colors coming to the fore at varying times. On some numbers, ONeil
uses rhythm very directly — "forcefully" is the wrong term for music as
sweetly diffident as this — but, as the album rolls out, the artist
starts to strip away such rhythm. "A Snapshot" features plenty of
sleigh-bells and some distant drumming, but the most forthright thing
there is the singer's multi-track'd vocals (which sound more beautiful
than ever on the record), which sing out in some sort of seasonal
caroling, b'fore the song builds up a voluminous clamor of meaty
piano chords and sinewy electric guitar that grows to swallow the lusty
chorus. After that, though, the disc's final songs establish a
stilled, calm air that lulls the longplayer to a gentle conclusion. On
"Known Perils," the rhythm is staked out by ONeil's stalking
guitar playing, and the polyrhythmic tension comes from laid-over lines
of violin from Liarbird's Nora Danielson, which rub up against each
other with warming friction. On close, on "Tea Is Better Than Poison,"
ONeil uses the melodica, whose innate rhythm is the cyclical breathing
of the player, to establish the song's opaque nature, this final
instrumental stanza — in which acoustic guitar dances with more of
Danielson's violin and bass from her bandmate Themba Lewis (herself an
artist behind some amazing rock-show poster-art) — feeling like a lengthy
exhalation, a breathing out in which the album slowly lets go of all the
instruments ONeil's used throughout its rambling 42 minutes, ending the
disc with a lonesome banjo that slowly picks its way out of the
melodica's breathy fog.
It's this song, there, that shows that ONeil is starting to understand
such multi-instrumentalist home recording better. Whilst she's hardly a
dub producer just yet, there is a sense of "navigating through space"
that the songsmith cultivates on much of this set. Compared to the
bare-boned skeleton-songs of Bones, it's not like this album could be
called a "stripping away" from earlier solo forays, but ONeil no longer
seems like an at-home player in whose tendencies linger vestiges of her
post-rocker history. She's still assembling songs — and albums — from
varying pieces, but no longer is she laying a foundation and then sewing
on layer after layer of "finishing touches." Here, we hear a song like
the gorgeous "The Poisoned Mine" (previously previewed on Bones), and
all
the instruments surrounding ONeil's central singing/guitar-playing do
little to obscure this, the added sound not various gossamer layers
whose thickness soon makes for a dense, ghostly clouds, but instead
seeming like the most delicate touches stitched around her song's edges —
the sewn whole a tune as warm and reassuring as the most treasured
childhood blanket.
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