The forthcoming single release for Mara Carlyle's show-stopping torch song
"I Blame You Not" — in which her peerless voice swoops over wails of
musical saw and a piano motif "borrowed" from Schumann — will come as an EP called I Blame Dido. We're to read from that, perhaps, that Carlyle
hasn't found the world so welcoming to her solo debut. Blessed with
such a graceful voice, on an album working with delicate flickers of
programming and sweeping strings and glissando piano, Carlyle — having
collaborated with Plaid, Max de Wardener, and Herbert in the past — has
probably found herself shepherded towards what's left of the trip-hop
flock by those who listen to music like sheep, the leader of such a
herd, these days, being Dido, I guess. Whilst I can understand the
desire to gather tastefully-pretty-but-kinda-prosaic discs together, to
hem Carlyle in in such a pen is like sending the lamb of God to the
slaughter. The truth of the matter is that her purely divine debut
disc is absolutely poetic, going so beyond the Lovely of its The
Lovely title to some beyond-pretty place where loveliness and prettiness
are equal to the most astonishing profundity. Carlyle's songbird singing is
not just pretty and lovely, strictly audio-decorative in that
trip-hop-ist sense (and sensibility), but physical and tactual and
sensual and so riddled with emotion, emotional not just in a personal
way, but in that way that a torch singer should be able to sing life into
any standard. And the life she sings into her own songs — all authored,
arranged, and produced by her, with just a bit of help from Plaid, de
Wardener, and, uh, Schumann and Mozart — is absolutely alive, living and
breathing in her vocal exhalations, the purity of her vocalized voice
contrasting with the constricting of her throat, the squeeze of her
lungs, the expansion of her diaphragm. All these things are kept audible as
Carlyle, in true school-of-Herbert fashion, mics her mouth ever so
close, and keeps all the "life" — breath, saliva, unsticking lips — in
and around those moments of singing. And, boy, can she sing; the
multi-tracked a cappella "June 15" is a gorgeous lament, "Bravely Born(e)"
a hymn of reassurance, "Bonding" a ballad burning with conflicting
desires of independence and devotion (the album devoted to her husband,
"who puts the stars in my eyes, the moons in my nails, and the sun in my
belly"). And it's not just the sad songs that say so much; Carlyle's
voice seems even more irrepressible and irresistible in the disc's
more "upbeat" numbers. The exuberantly electronic pop song "Lost to Sea"
finds her recalling a dream of drowning in lyrical poetry — "I was
tied to the land/ But I tore off my skin/ And threw myself in/ And I tried
to sew stitches to the waves/ And screamed that I would save you" — as
the song rises on swells of busy programming, battered drums, splashed
cymbals, and churning church-organ. And, then, the disc closes with two
playful, powerful songs: "Baby Bloodheart" sending Carlyle's caroling
pirouetting through pizzicato strings and thrummed ukulele; and, then,
"For Me" finding a finale that gives us the most beautiful vocal
performance on a disc filled with them, Carlyle hitting literal and
aesthetic heights as she sings a plea for a moment to be frozen forever;
her sublime singing an attempt to recreate the perfection of a treasured
instant. In evocation of such perfection, it's a perfectly fitting end
to a disc that comes dangerously close to being perfect.
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