Label: Outside in Music, 2021
Personnel - Lara Solnicki: vocals, poems; Jonathan Goldsmith: keyboards, electronics, electric bass, electric guitar; Peter Lutek: alto saxophone, electro-acoustic clarinet, bassoon; Hugh Marsh: electric violin; Rob Piltch: electric and acoustic guitar; Scott Peterson: electric and acoustic bass; Rich Brown: electric bass; Davide Di Renzo: drums.
The Canadian vocalist, composer and poet Lara Solnicki was blessed with an exquisite vocalic articulation and the art of poetry, as well as an impressive ability to blend genres such as classical, free jazz and experimental music. Working with a host of heroic players that lend her music a distinctive palette, she unfurls her most complexly detailed and ambitious work to date with this third outing, The One and the Other, a song cycle of utterly original tone poems.
The opener, “Bit Her Sweet Christopher Street”, immediately drew me in with its immersive words and the offbeat ideas presented by the pianist/producer Jonathan Goldsmith, an adept of inharmonic dripping and dissonant intervals, and the alto saxophonist Peter Lutek, who infuses extra tension and tonal contrast in his anguished blows. Even if only for a brief time, the guitarist Rob Piltch haunts us with an indie-rock fire that prompts the drummer Davide DiRenzo to muscle things up in response. The inspiration here was Debussy’s song cycle “5 Poèmes de Baudelaire”.
The enriched classical movements of Bach are aligned with the genuine freedom of jazz on “Idée Fixe”, where the saxophone goes hand in hand with the sweet-sounding vocalise. The harmonic stability is disturbed during a fascinating conversation between piano and sax, and then resumed in the final section.
Airing Bjork-like demeanors, “The Embrace” tells the story of two lovers frozen outside time and space, and its views differ from “Furling Leaf, Retrocede”, which employs sinister, startling, and occasionally psychedelic soundscapes in the sublime filmic grandeur that accompanies its poem.
The album closes with the three-part suite that lends the album its title, a tragic tale of a man that drowns in his image of love. “The One and the Other I: a Pass Glass” sets a resolute, unhurried voice against a jittery knitting of complex instrumentation. Some push-pull motions are detected, and a necessary bass groove even stirs a few passages by giving it a reassuring heartbeat. “II: Awe of the Sea” feels quietly and feverishly dreamy except for a portion of time when fierce drum fills and aggressive cymbals resound in the background, and then “III: Hollow the Need”, a little rougher around the edges, paints a vividly noir scene according to the tale’s heavy conclusion.
Solnicki makes every line a new experience, turning herself loose with a spontaneous sense of narrative and a transfixing experimental posture. This album is an exciting voyage of discovery that claims a different place in her oeuvre.
Grade A-
Favorite Tracks:
01 - Bit Her Sweet Christopher Street ► 02 - Idée Fixe ► 06 - The One and the Other II: Awe of the Sea