IDA - Lovers Prayers

It can't be easy to have a decade-plus career spent almost entirely in the shadows, marked by countless albums written and recorded purely for the love of it, and saddled with the cumbersome comparison to Low, a band with which Elizabeth Mitchell and Dan Littleton's Ida have always shared a refined taste for slowed-down atmospheres and ethereal melodies, set within skillfully interwoven vocals and consistently understated arrangements. Despite a discography lacking any truly standout peaks (with the possible exception of "Ten Small Paces") and the limited attention they've garnered outside American indie circles, Ida have carried on with honest passion, making records and repeatedly questioning, through various ups and downs, their own sensibility and stylistic identity.

That's the case again with "Lovers Prayers", the seventh album in their catalogue, arriving three years after "Heart Like A River" and marking something of a turning point in the band's history: they traded their native New York for Levon Helm's recording studio in the Catskill Mountains. The mountain setting and placid rural surroundings seem to have left their mark on the sound of this record, which combines, on one hand, highly personal touches of acoustic folk, and on the other, a spontaneity and compositional dynamism unseen in much of their earlier work.

The fourteen tracks that make up "Lovers Prayers" don't simply rehash the band's usual caressing melodies, laid over understated rhythms and muffled arrangements; alongside them sit pieces with more complex harmonic structures and a wider range of musical and vocal registers.

You can tell right away that this is a more elaborate work than usual, from the enveloping piano notes of the opening title track, whose refined textures underpin the soft vocal blend and the simplicity of melodic repetitions still capable of casting a timeless spell. That variety and relative momentum dissipate as the album proceeds, however, soon settling back into the band's familiar static, ethereal atmospheres — ones that often lack the impact needed to leave a lasting impression and avoid the sense of weary drift that sets in, especially towards the end of a record whose runtime of over an hour does it no favours.

Still, while some of the later tracks are frankly dispensable, and even a decent song like "Gravity" is too mannered not to once again conjure the spectre of Low, the most convincing side of "Lovers Prayers" emerges where the band manages to break free of well-worn clichés and venture into something slightly different from their usual fare, even if it's still filtered through their own style and particular sensibility.

This is what happens in the hushed blues of "Worried Mind Blues" and in the subdued, anaesthetic choral quality of "Willow Tree", where the first timid folk hints begin to emerge, later developed in "For Shame Of Doing Wrong" and "The Killers 1964", along with the aforementioned title track, among the best-realized tracks on the record. The former introduces, over its underlying expanses of sound, an indolent little guitar that lends concrete warmth to Mitchell's impalpable vocals, while the latter is a small cameo of delicate, dusty orchestral folk, beautifully softened by the string arrangement and the ethereal vocal polyphony.

Between highs and lows, between moments of engagement and moments of fatigue, "Lovers Prayers" is yet another testament to a band destined to remain minor, yet one that still manages to deliver sincere, nuanced emotions, still worth savouring at least for fans of the genre.

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26/01/2008