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Rating: Lao writes a "review" about Thao.
He writes it because no one had yet written one, neither about this record here nor about others.
He writes it (also) because it is a new record. But not all new records are worth writing about.
He writes it because it's worth it. Exactly.
He writes it because, when he had the chance to discover this artist, Lao felt a strange sensation. The unusual - intoxicating - delightful feeling of something NEW being revealed to him in all its beauty. And I swear that the Taoist Lao Tze never used drugs nor anything else, but when he saw her for the first time, it seemed to him he was in Luang Prabang (you know, up there, where the Mekong is still far from the sea and meanders through twists and forests) and saw a girl playing the banjo in a corner, with a cowgirl hat and boots like those Loretta Lynn wore when she got on stage in Nashville. But girls with boots, on the Mekong... well - difficult.
Indeed she prefers to remain barefoot when the boots become uncomfortable. And she grew up in Virginia, and her music resonates more with echoes of Tennessee and Louisiana than with the placid sounds of Indochina, where they are inclined to pluck quite different strings. She grew up in Virginia before leaving and arriving in San Francisco, a city teeming with almond-shaped eyes but also musicians in every venue you encounter. And God only knows how many genetically modified country-folk organisms have been seen in the shadow of the Golden Gate, from Country Joe McDonald onwards. And in San Francisco, Miss Thao Nguyen, who has Vietnamese blood in her veins, found her dimension. Between visiting prisoners and charity concerts, already a rich (and delightfully enjoyable) independent discography to be archived, and... precisely, a quirky "little orchestra" vaguely "old-style" that accompanies her up and down the country - but doing something that, in terms of pure sound, is more original than ever.
Thao is a tinkerer. She takes a genre, flips it, extracts what she needs, and builds a singer-songwriter style tailored for her voice; with lyrics, depending on her moods: playful, provocative, reflective even, but without the weight (and pretense) of the desperately engaged author defending this cause or that blah blah blah. And you get it. All it takes is for her to meet a prisoner named Valerie Bolden to write a song about her and (on her story) come up with a pop/naïf frame - the title track - that already at a first distracted listen has its own why, before reaching the chorus/refrain which is something irresistible. And there the ideas begin to become more defined. Indie-folk yes, but in a certain way. Nashville is desecrated, reshaped, personalized. To the sound of a dry snare drum and that finely studio-crafted bass-banjo harmony...
...behind a veneer of apparent spontaneity, there are years of study and experience on how to conceive her idea of a "pop song". Even scratching the electric guitar (see "City") and drawing slightly more complicated geometries with a vibraphone that has little to do with country and something more with jazz (purists, feel free to vomit). "We Don't Call" is pure playing with sounds, but it's a game that (on the tracks of a decontextualized faux-soul) has orgasmic outcomes to say the least, while New Orleans peeks through in that brass noise which "The Feeling Kind" dissolves into. Appearing in "Kindness To Be Conceived" is instead Joanna Newsom, whose voice marries unexpectedly sublimely with our artist's - so much so that it is THIS luxury surprise which, throughout the 36 minutes of the album, will most catch your attention (an acoustic fun almost bordering on childish, but that's precisely the beauty).
And then...what else to anticipate, fishing here and there, if not perhaps the pick-plucked and incredibly "vintage" bass you hear on "The Day Long", the keyboard mishmash of "Every Body" and its languid rhythm, the lopsided (like a hobbling horse) pace of "Move", and the almost slow-blues of "Age Of Ice" to close... how difficult it is to choose something in particular. But for the past month, there's not a week this CD hasn't passed through my player...
...defying the genres under which they (vainly) strive to place this and the discs preceding it.
But so be it.
Tracklist
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