SANDY DILLON - Pull The Strings

Sandy Dillon belongs, by all rights, to the category of the "eternally overlooked". An artist of enormous potential, constantly shut out of productions, deals (rightfully owed to her), and a music world oblivious to her formidable presence. Her career is entirely strewn with contracts that never materialized, albums never released, and a never-ending string of excellent collaborations - the only things ever able to reveal her, even if only partially, to a wider audience. Her first two records, "Electric Chair" ('99) and "East Overshoe" ('01), made in collaboration with Steve Bywater, show from the very start all of Dillon's fiery verve; her music is a distillation, reread in feminine key, of all the essential components of the master from Pomona. Her songs are a continuous affront, a slap in the face to insane worldliness; dragged along by a disjointed blues, always able to pair her raspy wails with her obsessive lyrics, in which melody and rhythm constantly refer back to the nihilism of Tom Waits.

Her latest release, "Pull The Strings", reworks every piece of the unfinished puzzle, trying to find the right hook toward total consecration. The atmosphere surrounding every single minute of this work is dark and ironic at once; there's room for everything: from the banter exchanged with Rob Love on "Why?", to the acid-blues outbursts of the title track, all the way to the shattered vocalizing of "I Fell In Love", the only track where Sandy partly departs from Waits to edge closer to the unhinged neuroses of Don Van Vliet.

On "Who's Answering" she mourns the final cry of a deeply lonely woman, the desperate plea to be heard from someone who still has so much to say and give. Quite a different matter is the angelic comfort of "Enter The Flame"; here Dillon is calm, soothed by a feeling that rarely manages to win over her graces, her very womanhood. Her voice is sweet, "feminine", freed from the exhausting lyrical vehemence of the other tracks, paradoxically close to the vocal sensuality of Hope Sandoval. "Over My Head", with its slow, lysergic unfolding, shatters every illusion, every romantic ambition, smashing them against a wall of torment, somewhere between spoken word and screaming, with no way out and no soothing symphony on the horizon; a drunken, psychedelic blues. "Blindcore" could be a b-side of "Frank's Wild Years" lifted straight from Waits's drawers, just as the splendid "Motherless Children" evokes the intense atmospheres of "Blue Valentine".

What strikes, and saddens at the same time, is the excessive reliance on Tom Waits's canon, on his entire repertoire. Where Dillon manages to pay off the debt of fascination owed to her mentor, she sheds all her gifts from that unreachable model, openly showing us her potential, her "real" charm, the full breadth of her artistic flair. When she shines with her own light ("Wedding Night"), her music glows even brighter; for a few brief moments we can finally brush the hair from her forehead to look her straight in the eyes. All of this inevitably fades whenever the emulation becomes obvious, however accomplished and consistently moving it may be. That's why "Pull the Strings" sits somewhere in the middle: with due caution, it will always remain a great record, narrowly missed from joining the ranks of "true" masterpieces.

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24/09/2006