TINY VIPERS - Hands Across The Void

Jesy Fortino is a Seattle singer-songwriter working with the now-familiar format of home recordings for acoustic guitar and voice. The usual Sub Pop sniffs out the deal: amplifying the solemn, drowsy (folkish) charge of songs that are utterly oblivious to any notion of easy listening, commercial appeal, or radio-friendly feeling. Every track on "Hands Across The Void", her debut album as Tiny Vipers, carries above all a powerful sense of resignation. It's this feeling that bears the weight of crisscrossing a cappella vocals, ultra-subdued vocal lines, and endless strings of single-chord arpeggios.

"Shipwreck" is a song in a major key (almost a madrigal), adorned with solemn counterpoints of brass and dark woodwinds, which gradually morphs into an archaic lullaby worthy of Newsom's "Ys", then into an undulating invocation over a tireless, cataleptic arpeggio. "Forest On Fire" is a catatonic psalm built on an ecstatic chant, over which an impressive crescendo of distortion and cacophonous, searing, inextricable feedback is grafted, over a low drone (something very close to the title track of Six Organs Of Admittance's "School Of The Flower"), arriving from the realm of the Tibetan mantra, a metaphor and symbol of inner burning.

In "Campfire Resemblance" the same mantra-liturgical chant is embellished with digital dissonances in the style of Keith Fullerton Whitman, while "On This Side" – the most conventional track – offers a sly, breezy tempo (though still bittersweet and broken). "Swastika", the longest and most complex piece, opens with stern, heavily reverbed chords, dialoguing both with silence (and a kind of dark cotton-wool that props up the whole track) and with a mournful arpeggio and a new series of solo-choral motets. In the second part, more orchestrated and more musical, choral stanzas in free verse push their way through (before returning to the enigma of the solitary chords). The closer ("The Downward") is even more mystical and mysterious; from a long instrumental intro (a folk pace that is once again fractured and pained) it moves into the entrance of a resolute, essential voice, into voice-guitar rarefactions, until it evaporates into a hushed, dark drone bordering on dark-ambient, halfway between the last exhalation of folksingers' souls and the ending of "Mulholland Drive".

More than a collection of songs, this album feels like an imperfect summary of techniques and emotional notes (Bailiff, the already-mentioned Newsom, Marshall, Dalton, Fursaxa, Nadler, O'Neil, Bunyan, even the Cranberries' singer, Dolores O'Riordan, and Joy Of Cooking's Terry GarthWaite). Working, as Fortino has, through ecstatic stylization, one arrives at the already-familiar matter of bare introspection, doled out down to the last decibel. Not exactly an added value (which, properly nurtured, could lead to a kind of artistic manifesto), it is nonetheless the styling of a shrewd, passionate creative labor on and for the writing itself, in turn stubborn, thoughtful, fragile yet sustained. The final combustion of "Forest On Fire" earns a place in the finest weird-folk gallery of all time; many of the vocal-instrumental passages succeed, backed by a seriously relentless acoustic guitar. An unreleased (earlier) track, "They Might Follow You", is available via MySpace.

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30/08/2007