(June 2009) A poignant song cycle that reveals its secrets over repeated listening

This Month's Pick: Moby's Wait For Me Moby is famous as a maker of dance and electro-pop music, but the musician has always had an ambient side. You could hear it in his early work for the Instinct label, collected on the album, Ambient, as well as later albums like Play the B-Sides and the second disc of Hotel. But Wait for Me is Moby's most deeply felt and atmospheric album yet. He mixes minor key instrumentals that roil in undertows of texture with modern hymns and laments that ask the big questions in a personal way. You can hear echoes of Moby's previous work throughout Wait for Me. Although there's only one track, "Study War," that has the archival voice samples Moby made famous on Play, his lyric phrasing has that sense of old gospel and blues, sampled and cut. "Pale Horses,” a song contemplating death, recalls the wistful scratchy sampled vocals of Play, but are actually sung by Amelia Zirin Brown in a voice that’s tired beyond her young years.  And she does it again on the gospel hymn cadences of "Walk With Me." The title track is another song that seems to contemplate eternity of a lost soul. It's sung by Kelli Scarr, who has a fragility that breaks over the waves of Moby's ghost rhythms, minimalist piano figure and sonic scrims. She sings "I'm gonna ask you to look away, I lost my hands and it hurts to pray," like a half-remembered nursery rhyme, a paean to lost youth, a contemplation of the end. On a couple of tracks, Moby sings in a voice that's less than perfect, but like Brian Eno, it's an instrument that conveys what's needed. He's heartbreaking on "Mistake," falling somewhere between David Bowie and Lou Reed in a song of regret, singing "You never felt this lost before, and the world is closing doors/I never wanted anything more." Despite desperate lyrics, it's the only rocking tune on the CD. For all its synthesizers and processing tricks, Wait for Me is strangely quaint in its sound design, like a vision of the future from the past, covered in dust and cobwebs and attaining a deeper meaning through its archival status. Of course there are cinematic moments like the instrumental "Shot in the Back of the Head," which takes a grinding, off-center backwards riff and then launches it into a twisted Ennio Morricone-like landscape with Moby's slide guitar. On "Scream Pilots," Moby spins around Ulrich Schnauss dancing on a surf rhythm, churning electronics and ringing guitar. Moby said he wanted to make a personal album, and he did, but Wait for Me also speaks to universal yearning, in a song cycle that reveals its secrets over repeated listening. It will bring you to tears in its forlorn poignancy, but will lift you up in the end. It's our Echoes CD of the Month for July. Wait for Me is not a summer album, but a timeless album. © 2009 John Diliberto

Get our CD Pick delivered to you each month--
Join the Echoes CD of the Month Club!

Previous Picks:

(June 2009) A contemplative chill in down-tempo electronica Listen to a review

Tosca No Hassle The Viennese duo called Tosca may take their name from the Puccini opera, but this plugged in pair doesn't usually have romantic intrigue and mezzo-sopranos in mind when they compose. With No Hassle, they've made an album that goes deeper than the chillout lounge. It may not make it onto the dance floor, but it will reverberate across the ballroom in your head with a sultry beckoning call and warm embrace. Richard Dorfmeister and Rupert Huber are eclectic musicians, avant-garde bred, jazz besotted and electronically wired. Their music, going back to their 1997 debut with "Chocolate Elvis," has always mixed heady atmospheres with sly asides and No Hassle is no different. But the mood is purely seductive here on tracks like "Birthday" with Julie McCarthy intoning a poem of "heaven's embroidered cloths" and "dreams laid" at your feet while her knowing chorus moans "Get Away." Tosca eschews conventional song forms and dramatic arcs on No Hassle. Each track establishes a sonic terrain and plays around inside it. They slide some blues guitar into "Joe Si Ha," a hypnotic track that offers a midnight drive through burnt neon plains. Space age keyboards, funky guitar riffs, non sequitur spoken word fragments and jazzy grooves circulate through the CD in a grab-bag of sonic references that cohere more often than they should, like on "Rosa," which mixes more blues guitar with country acoustic reverb-drenched strumming, a swirling keyboard, and conga rhythm. The result is intoxicating, especially when the guitar hits a Hawaiian-style slide. As part of the duo Kruder & Dorfmeister, Richard Dorfmeister hit the scene with sampling electronica in 1993, about the same time as Moby. "Raymondo" recalls Moby's Play both with its moody keyboard-based atmospheres and the soulful field recording calling out a fragment over an insistent groove. The second disc is a live concert from the Ars Electronica festival in Switzerland, for which No Hassle was originally conceived. If anything, it's an even more immersive experience, with alternate mixes and piano soliloquies in a seamless performance. Tosca's No Hassle is electronica's answer to "Don't Worry, be Happy," a soundtrack to "turn off your mind, relax and float downstream." It's our Echoes CD of the Month for June. © 2009 John Diliberto

(May 2009) An ambient accomplice of Brian Eno creates pastoral music for strings Listen to a review

Leo Abrahams The Grape and the Grain Guitarist Leo Abrahams must exist in a perpetual fugue state. Upon hearing his new CD, The Grape and the Grain, you might not suspect he's been collaborating with Brian Eno for years. His Scene Memory album of abstract, electronically manipulated guitar finds few echoes here. The Unrest Cure, his previous CD of rockin' electronica vocal tunes with longtime associates like Ed Harcourt and KT Tunstall, couldn't possibly be from the same musician. Instead, The Grape and the Grain traffics in a poetic reverie harking back to the sound of his debut album, Honeytrap, a melodic trap of gorgeous, sometimes nostalgic themes. The tone is set, though hardly frozen, on the opening track, "Masquerade." A medieval lute called the bandura doubles the Renaissance melody of Abrahams's acoustic guitar, biding time until the cello and hurdy-gurdy crank in. It's the first step on a walk in the woods through classically arranged forests, Americana-dusted plains and English folk-fed streams. The sound hits the ears as unplugged, but there's lots of 50s reverb and tremolo guitar layered into the acoustic guitars, ethnic strings, and an ensemble that could have come off the corner of a Parisian café. "From Here" has an early-60s "Ebb Tide" feel while "Spring Snow" echoes the Pat Metheny Group, with Abrahams's arpeggiated guitar riff and Tim Harris's double bass. With its twangy guitar, "Ghost on Every Corner" is a pastoral riff on spaghetti western themes. Abrahams brings us back home on the album’s closer, "Daughter of Persuasion," a haunting piece that culminates in grinding hurdy-gurdy and distorted guitars over an insistent groove. It's back to the world, but the world looks better now. Like The Penguin Café Orchestra in the past or Ludovico Einaudi in the present, Leo Abrahams taps a vein in music that is ultimately more profound than its pleasant, quaint surface. He pulls off a rare feat, making music that looks wistfully to a simpler time, but is touched with a modernist’s hand. The Grape and the Grain is the perfect Echoes CD of the Month for May. © 2009 John Diliberto

(April 2009) Drummer creates other musical worlds Listen to a review

Morgan Doctor Other Life Morgan Doctor is one of those musicians who finds herself between worlds. The music on her new solo album, Other Life, is marked by imagery-laden journeys colored with Indian instruments and ambient designs. She's a world music percussionist who's just as likely to play tabla drums in a kirtan session with Durga Das as mount the stage with The Cliks, a Canadian power-punk band. On Other Life, Doctor mixes eight layered and textured instrumentals with a quartet of heartrending vocal tracks. The first is "There Were Horses," a sensual haiku with Clara Engel singing forlornly over Doctor's cyclical hang drum rhythm. It sets the introspective mood of the album, which contemplates themes of mortality through an eastern prism. "Namsam Sunrise" even uses a monk chanting at a Buddhist funeral in Korea. But while Doctor practices Yogic philosophies, her music is more progressive than meditative. Odd time signatures and expansive arrangements make her compositions cinematic in scope. It's a reflective mood but with hard charging grooves on tracks like "Silver City" and "Rebel." Benjy Wertheimer guests on tracks like "Come Smiling Back," playing the Indian violin called the esraj, bending out those melancholy, resonant-string drenched themes. Violin and cello are over-dubbed into soaring string choirs on "Silver City." That leads into one of three songs with singer/lyricist Tamara Williamson. "Show Me How" is a study in epic passion, the simplest of love songs performed with heroic shoegazer moodiness. I put it right next to Heidi Berry's "Cradle." The album winds down through more ethereal terrain, beginning with the eastern trance psychedelia of "A Moment to Go," through to the aforementioned "Namsan Sunrise" and contemplative album closer, "Better Person." Morgan Doctor’s Other Life is a CD of transcendent ecstacy and subversive melody and it's our Echoes CD of the Month for April. © 2008 John Diliberto

(March 2009) Chilled cellos and melancholy moods Listen to a review

David Darling Prayer for Compassion David Darling goes low on his new CD, Prayer for Compassion. His is not the cello of virtuoso playing and high flying pizzicato runs. He can do that, but on most of his CDs, and especially Prayer, he's going for a deeper, more introspective sound. It follows suit from his previous CDs like Eight-String Religion and Cello Blue (read a review) as he orchestrates a blissfully turned landscape, over-dubbing cello choirs, laying down reverb-drenched melodies and looping trancey rhythms. The opening "Untold Stories" sets the somnolent tone of the album with an udu-loop groove that drives into deeper layers of cello over-dubs. Prayer for Compassion can seem dark and foreboding, an endless largo toward the abyss. But deeper listening reveals a quiet joy on the title track with the Ars Nova Choir providing a soft Enya-like pad to Darling's mix of pizzicato and arco playing. Samite lays a kalimba cycle on "Beautiful Life" with Darling's trumpet-like vocalese making this one of the few tunes that might be considered light and airy. On "War is Outdated," the cellist takes a walk on the beach where the song title's protestations are belied by the breezy melody. Those are a few among some surprisingly light and playful moments on Prayer for Compassion. Darling even drops in a quote from "Oh Susannah" on "Shoe Strings." Throughout Prayer for Compassion, co-producer Mickey Houlihan judiciously deploys subtle environmental recordings that flow into the backdrops Darling lays down like seeds swirling from a tree. David Darling recorded his first solo album, Journal October in 1979. Thirty years later, Prayer for Compassion, like Darling himself, gets deeper and reveals more shadings and nuances with each listening. It's our Echoes CD of the Month for March. © 2008 John Diliberto

(February 2009) A rocking bassist takes the ambient instrumental path Listen to a review

Erik Scott Other Planets There have been a lot of virtuoso electric bass albums released over the years. Musicians like Jaco Pastorius and Stanley Clarke tried to become gunslinging front men with an instrument that's usually holding down the bottom end of a groove. But bassist Erik Scott has taken a different approach. To say that his solo debut, Other Planets, is a bass guitar album is to miss what a powerful, cinematic release he's created. It's an album that's more Pink Floyd than Jaco Pastorius. Scott isn't a frustrated electric guitarist. He's a composer as much as a bass player who dives into the deep soul and nuances of the bass, extracting sensuous melodies and atmospheric moods. After the opening vamp tune "Bartalk," Scott untethers the bass and heads into space. The title track started life as "Sundogs" on Test Pattern, the last album from Chicago alt-rockers Sonia Dada, which whom Scott has played for nearly two decades. It's a spacious track with rolling mallet tom-tom drums underpinning Scott's rubbery fretless bass lead as synth choirs soar through the background. Although Scott plays most of the instruments, including keyboards and drum loops, he brought in some key musicians, notably, John Pirruccello on pedal-steel guitar. He adds some celestial glissandos on "Other Planets" and then brings some cosmic country to the serene "Peace on Saturn." You can hear echoes of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour's sustained guitar leads in many of Pirruccello's lines. And remember, Gilmour played lap steel on Dark Side of the Moon. Erik Scott gets some driving, trancy grooves going on "Proper Sun" and he evokes Ennio Morricone's spaghetti western sound on "Donnie & Sancho." Besides Sonia Dada, Erik Scott is best known for playing with Alice Cooper in the early 1980s and Flo & Eddie (singers from The Turtles and Frank Zappa) just before that. None of that really prepares you for the sensitivity and depth of Other Planets. Erik Scott's Other Planets is a bass player's album, if your idea of a bass player's album includes haunting moods and heartbreaking melodies. It's our February CD of the Month on Echoes. © 2008 John Diliberto

(January 2009) Listen to a review

Kaya Project And So It Goes Some records simply exude joy and dispense intoxication and that's the sound of And So It Goes, by Kaya Project. The title may suggest a certain resigned attitude or an inadvertent nod to Billy Joel, yet the music is anything but, on both counts. Seb Taylor is the master mixer of Kaya Project and on their third album, he brings in many of the same ethno-electronica elements that made the first two discs so exhilarating. "Always Waiting" serves as something of an overture to the album with cross-picking guitar, Indian percussion, and tribal vocals from Irina Mikhailova, diva of the late and lamented Lumin and countless other ethno-fusions. Equally compelling is Taylor's partner, Natasha Chamberlain. She co-composed several tracks and sings in a wordless style on songs like "Obsidian Beats," where her voice is stacked in chanting choirs against Bollywood strings. Kaya Project uses voices as instrumental colors instead of lyric vehicles. Besides Chamberlain and Mikhailova, other tracks include Deeyah, who takes a Bollywood turn on several tracks and the soulful voice of Randolph Matthews. The vocals play alongside some virtuoso musicians including clarinetist Susi Evans and violinist Deepak Pandit, who can be found wailing on most of the tracks. Taylor, who started as a guitarist before he went digital, draws deeply on American blues and folk music in his playing, from the swampy reverb and tremolo intro of "Five Plus Eight" to the slide guitar that seems to slip into every setting he creates. Kaya Project's ethnic brew is all-embracing, from the bluesy "Jamming with Marco" to the ethno-techno excursion of "Obsidian Beats." That's tough to do on an album that goes from Klezmer clarinet to country picking, raga sarangi to electronica grooves. Sometimes that's all on one track, but Kaya Project make it sound like one happy global party. We take it for a spin as the first Echoes CD of the Month for 2009. © 2008 John Diliberto

[Return to Top]

There are many more recommended CDs from past months here>>