DESCRIPTION:
"Lark" is one of the most formative bodies of work I have ever encountered. Quite simply, this one album imprinted itself on me for a lifetime.

Today I found a review of "Lark" with the following remarks: "No longer a wild weapon that can soar from childlike lilt to screaming dog whistle without a moment's notice, she channels her range to the emotions it demands, an economy most noticeable on the folky 'It's the Frame,' which finds her accompanied by her own guitar alone." I hadn't known this, that she had been a wilder river-rafter of soundscapes, before "Lark".

Yet, one of the reasons I resonate so deeply with her music is probably precisely because of that capacity she has, to lead me through landscapes of sound I've never imagined. She can, all on her own, express both concept and emotion in a multiplicity of musical 'tongues': timbres, tonalities, personalities, moods, textural qualities, lyrical incarnations.

She saunters, vocally, with eerie grace, from guttural, gravelly, tense, or sharp, to soaring, soulful, celestial, or even compellingly fragile. She also tosses surprising drops of pure sugarcane juice right into gritty passages.

In moments, she is totally accessible, as if she were right in front of me, on an empty, rural, red-dirt shortcut between farms miles apart, talking like she would to her best girlfriend, or herself: unguarded, from the gut, earthy and visceral... occasionally even in plain words, abandoning melody altogether. Then she swings me into a luscious, concert-hall-filling entrancement of soaring lyricism, or wraps me in harmonies as rich and sumptuous as a sudden, lavish spill of sunshine, resplendent after the chill of a damp grove dense with shadows.

Sometimes she goes the other way, starting with subtle, watercolor lusciousness. Entrancingly silken swathes of lulling, melodic layers lead me through labyrinthine (yet somehow natural)transitions — into dissonance, moaning, tension, fragments of pathos... — and back again.

She is, alternately: curious toddler, spooked child, wonder-drunk adolescent, soulful intuitive, hard-luck sophisticate, sensual siren, frank truth-speaker, romantic visionary, attention-seeker, humanitarian, realist, optimist, cynic, dance-catalyst, political commentator, spiritual bliss celebrant, human nature critic, lover, dreamer, and woman of incontrovertible wisdom beyond her years or generation. Sweet, sharp, deep, whimsical, substantive, translucent.

But, as the review says, she does all that with elegant restraint. She is understated, as if offering her listeners only selected tendrils, filaments, from her secret, wild, infinite interior. Somehow, her voice conveys an underlying, contained power, to rise wildly above the banks of the enticing musical rivulet she is winding us through, in that album.

I find that album irresistible and inexhaustible, perhaps in part because of its flirtatious intimations of what was withheld, tantalizing the palette suggestively, as a few fine grains of potent, wholly unfamiliar spices can transform a meal into a seduction.

© Genève Gil