Tara Jane O' Neil - Chiaroscuro Post-Folk

If you think about it, there's almost always a city's name that gets paired, in the minds of devotees and casual fans alike, with a genre, a movement or a trend in the history of American music. Say jazz and you think of New Orleans, just as Memphis brings to mind delta blues and many of its later incarnations. Not to mention Los Angeles and New York, starting points from the Seventies onward for numerous, effervescent chapters in the ever-varied world of rock and all its many offshoots, from psychedelia to hardcore to new wave.

Louisville is a city in Kentucky that, in the early '90s, had the merit of hosting one of the most interesting scenes in American indie rock, very much alive in those years even if overshadowed by the big commercial phenomena marching out of Seattle to conquer the world. It was in Louisville that bands like Rodan and June of '44 were born, who, taking as their starting point two seminal records released a few years earlier - Slint's "Spiderland" (another Louisville band) and Codeine's "Frigid Stars" - redefined the rules of hardcore, mutating it into countless forms that would in turn map out the boundaries of so-called post-rock, producing work worthy of the fierce, already-established competition of the time (Big Black/Shellac, Fugazi, Unsane). Among those playing in Rodan was Tara Jane O'Neil, who at the time played bass, an instrument essential to the powerful alchemy of "Rusty", the band's extraordinary and sadly only album.

From the ashes of Rodan, and on the initiative of Sean Meadows of June Of '44, Sonora Pine were born in 1996, featuring, alongside Meadows and Tara Jane O'Neil, Bob Weston, Kevin Coustas, Samara Lubelski and Rachel Grimes - all musicians variously active in those years and afterwards in the bands already mentioned (Weston played bass in Steve Albini's Shellac) and others, such as Rachel's or Shipping News, all protagonists to varying degrees of the Louisville scene and its surrounding orbit. A hugely tangled and fruitful web, one that would leave an indelible mark on indie music in the last decade of the century, and well into the next one too, in the United States and beyond.

Sonora Pine's debut album (self-titled) came out in 1996 on Quarterstick and marked a significant shift from the sound of the bands from which all the group's members hailed. The post-hardcore fury of Rodan and the noisy mantras of June Of '44 give way to more meditative pieces, owing an equal debt to the minimalism of John Cage and the chamber suites of Rachel's and Penguin Café Orchestra. Only rarely ("The Hook", "Compass Lure" and the almost Fugazi-esque "Hoya Carnosa") does a certain echo of the players' noisy past peek through, albeit sedated.

Tara Jane O'Neil's voice makes its appearance on tracks like "The Gin Mills", "Goldmund" and "Ooltewah", though it's still too timid and largely overshadowed by the instruments, at times skillfully detuned (the guitars especially, somewhat in the manner of Polvo). The impression is of an ensemble of great, kindred musicians who still lack just a touch of the alchemy needed to reach the heights already attained by the various bands they came from. Still, this is music of real class.

The following year brought II, the band's second album, a natural continuation of the first. The tones, and O'Neil's own voice, seem to have softened almost entirely ("Eek", "Cloister" and "Snow's Cut Snapshot" are genuine lo-fi folk ballads): it's a record with no real missteps, but one that ends up leaving a sense of predictability, as if the band had nothing more to say - and it's perhaps no coincidence that "II" would be Sonora Pine's final album.

Before embarking on what has now been a solo career spanning more than a decade, Tara Jane O'Neil teamed up with her friend Cynthia Nelson on the Retsin project, whose first fruit was Egg Fusion in 1996, followed in 1999 by Sweet Luck Of Amarillis and in 2001 by Cabin In The Woods. These are records (especially the second one) that reveal the gentler side of Tara Jane O'Neil's musical sensibility, a tender folk with country shadings, made up mostly of voice and acoustic guitar, free of the frictions typical of Sonora Pine that would, to varying degrees, resurface in TJ's later records.

2000 marked her solo debut, with an album titled Peregrine. The opener ("A City In The North") echoes the discordances of Sonora Pine, while "Sunday Song", "Another Sunday" and "The Fact Of A Seraph" veer toward a gentler, more elegant strain of folk; "1st Street", one of the record's best moments, is another folk track with faintly jazzy shadings (it sounds like a June Of '44 song rearranged by the Joni Mitchell of "Blue"). Elsewhere ("Ode To A Passing", "Bullhorn Moon") the old ghosts resurface, in the familiar shape of guitar dissonances heard repeatedly in the past, along with an unease that seems to simmer constantly under the surface, kept in check by an intimate, almost caressing mood, not unlike certain tracks by Lisa Germano. Musically, Peregrine is played and arranged with a spare, essential approach, in the manner of Nick Drake's "Pink Moon", with the voice standing shyly aside, as if wanting to blend into the music rather than interfere with it.

The following year came In The Sun Lines, again released on Quarterstick, a more sophisticated record than its predecessor, helped along by contributions from some of TJ's old friends (Ida Pearle and Dan Littleton of Ida, Rachel Grimes of Rachel's). The sonic palette had broadened, the arrangements felt more considered, even as the American songwriter's tendency to write unadorned, anything-but-spectacular songs remained unchanged. The sense is that in the studio O'Neil worked more insistently on her voice, and the results are clear from the stunning opener, "The Winds You Came Here On", a spectral, unsettling track that seems to condense the last ten years of Louisville's musical history.

Over the artfully assembled chaotic dissonance of "Your Rats Are", another of the album's high points, O'Neil trades vocals in a duet with Dan Littleton, and this time it's the voices that cut through the instrumental magma, softening it without changing its nature.

"All Jewels Small" and "Bowls" are two short instrumentals, somewhere between Rachel's and Tim Buckley, while "Sweet Bargaining" sounds like Sonic Youth reimagined as soul-jazz. And it's again a certain attitude halfway between jazz and slow-core that fills the narcotic calm of "High-Wire" or the gentle guitar-and-piano drapery of the lengthy "This Morning".

The album closes with two more instrumentals, the placid "New Harm" and the almost noise-driven "A Noise In The Head", true to its title.

Tara Jane O'Neil doesn't have an extraordinary voice, but on In The Sun Lines she knows exactly how to use it, while the music and arrangements are unquestionably more mature and refined than anything that came before.

The following year, on the Mr Lady label, came Tjo Tko, a record that leans further into TJ's experimental streak. The heavier use of electronics and vaguely lounge atmospheres give some tracks a flavor reminiscent of Portishead's funereal ballads ("Prick", "Welcome Back", "If You Blue"), while elsewhere the mood brightens into a kind of ambient-folk minimalism that vaguely recalls Lofty Pillars ("With Yours") or the kraut-pop of Stereolab, skillfully slowed down ("Choo").

Tara Jane O'Neil's creative drive shows no sign of flagging, and with it her urge to explore new sonic horizons - a hallmark of her entire career as a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, one that a few years later would find significant echoes even outside strictly musical territory.

You Sound, Reflect (2004) marks her debut on Chicago's legendary Touch & Go (from whose ranks Quarterstick had spun off in 1990). The dazzling opener "Take The Waking" is one of the finest songs of her career, a skillful blend of ambient and slow-core, seasoned with persistent, almost shoegaze-like backing vocals. Also striking is the curious - and quite successful - near-cover of Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat", retitled here "Famous Yellow Belly", while traditional folk takes center stage on tracks like "Howl", a ballad worthy of the best Cat Power, or "Poisoned Mine", perhaps her most celebrated song (though the word "celebrity" hardly suits an artist as stubbornly underground as O'Neil), rounded out by a catchy pop chorus that would make Beth Orton's fortune.

"Without Push" is almost country in the style of Barzin, "A Snapshot" is enriched with darker echoes, "Known Perils" updates Rachel's chamber folk along singer-songwriter lines, while the album closes with the restless instrumental "Tea Is Better Than Poison", another tribute to Louisville's sophisticated folk scene.

You Sound, Reflect is another well-realized record, to which Bones, released the same year on Preservation, feels almost like a coda, reusing a couple of tracks ("Poisoned Mine" and "Famous Yellow Belly", here in less experimental form). Worth noting are "Enter This House" and "Redux", two short, odd ambient exercises somewhere between house and dub. There are further echoes of Portishead on "Bullhorn Moon", but little else of note.

Bones is perhaps the least significant record of her career.

In Circles, released in 2006, again on Quarterstick, is a contradictory record. The pop directness of ballads like "A Partridge Song", "A Sparrow Song" and "The Louder" (which sounds like it could have come off a Lush record!), or the languid, sentimental à la Mazzy Star mood of "Blue Light Room", end up wrong-footing anyone used to O'Neil's more introverted, unpredictable song forms.

Only toward the end, with the subtle psychedelia of "The Looking Box" and the almost ambient, Colleen-like nursery-rhyme quality of "This Beats", does Tara Jane O'Neil return to the enigmatic territory that may suit her best.

In Circles feels like the classic transitional record caught between two distant shores, and in that sense it's somewhat unresolved.

Her experimental streak as an all-round artist, always drawn to the visual arts, finds new forms of expression in a work released the following year titled Wings. Strings. Meridians., which, alongside a series of outtakes and home-recorded sonic sketches drawn from some of her live performances, also includes, in the Yeti edition, a book featuring drawings marked by a bleak, unsettled abstraction - clear evidence (even more so than in her records) of an unmistakably troubled spirit, a spleen that has never truly been laid to rest.

In 2009, K Records released A Ways Away, an album that once again confirms TJ's new profile, by now apparently drawn toward the more reassuring shores of neo-folk songwriting, though still tinged here and there with a certain lo-fi attitude and all the spores that the American singer-songwriter carries over from her multifaceted past.

A pervasive melancholy runs through aching ballads like "In Tall Grass" or the already familiar "Howl", here rearranged; the opening "Dig In" and especially "A Vertiguous One" recall the delicate miniatures of Cocteau Twins' "Milk And Kisses", while "Drowning" is almost startling in the slenderness of its vocal and instrumental interplay.

The sounds of A Ways Away have become rarefied as never before: the new O'Neil increasingly resembles Marissa Nadler in her grace, and less and less Cat Power or Lisa Germano, restless spirits ever reluctant to smooth out their rough edges, appearances notwithstanding.

After two years of absence, Tara Jane O'Neil returned in 2011 with an album co-written with Japanese singer Nikaido Kazumi, containing a series of tracks created by the two artists between 2008 and 2010.

These are larval, improvised sound sketches that seem, above all, to help the distinctive singer-songwriter piece together the hybrid, colourful little poem that is Where Shine New Lights (2014), technically structured as a string of songs, a suite for voice and instruments that moves through subtle Eastern evocation, fragile contrapuntal sonatas and anaemic singing — one of her most radical albums and one of her most successful experiments, ten years on from You Sound Reflect and twenty from Rusty.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google