How about some Pixie Pirate Mythpunk Folk Rock?
This week’s #FeatureFriday artist is S. J. Tucker and her album – Quartered: Songs of Palimpsest.
The first thing you have to acknowledge about Quartered: Songs of Palimpsest is the commitment to art it feels embued with love and musicality. It’s poetry delivered in song and spoken word. There are elements of folk, soundtrack and experimental sound design. There’s a narrative to all the songs but there’s also a purity to the music. It has a strong melodic attitude and plays with genre very well. It doesn’t linger. It moves, serpentine like. The use organic and synthetic instruments really pushes the music but it never breaks.
It’s impressive, everything in the right place, the mixes sell the songs. The arrangements are well thought and out all the instrumental elements are played beautifully but the vocals. Damn, the vocals are just gorgeous.
If you have spare time this weekend you could be in for a treat if you take a listen to this album.
“Quartered: Songs of Palimpsest“ is something a little different. As a companion album to a novel, it doesn’t tell a cohesive story on it’s own like a concept album would, but offers fragments of a larger story. What it has to spare, however, is atmosphere. I was not familiar with the novel when I first heard this album, but I was struck with the amount of worldbuilding accomplished here. Instead of learning about the setting, the listener is confronted with glimpses into the feel of a romanesque or victorian world, where beauty and passion are a cover for intrigue and struggles for power. There is a dualistic undercurrent going through the individual tracks, further enforcing this feeling: rule and submission, beauty and terror, blood and machinery. And what makes all of this work as a remarkably cohesive piece, is of course S. J. Tucker herself.
S. J. is an experienced and accomplished storyteller in her own right and she put especially her voice through the paces for this one. Each song is performed in one or more different styles of vocalization, always higly expressive and with striking clarity. There is soft speak-singing and distorted belting, almost whispered high notes and nearly gutteral fry sounds. Effects like reverb and layered vocals are used in tasteful fashion, to make the tracks feel bigger than life. The variety in musical styles is as great as the one for vocals. There is the light alternative folk song “November”, the near-metal “Casimira”, the two ambient Train Suites (with lines read by author Catherynne M. Valente) and the operatic vocals-only “The Lovers’ Aria”. Overall, this is very different from most albums we have featured here so far. Like all of S. J. Tucker’s music, it is an experience, one that I highly encourage everyone to make.
What if there was a place beyond terror, beyond passion, where your obsessions come to life? Where your secrets walk the streets? Where the only law is desire? What would you do to get there? Past the edge of the world lies a city of the mind and of the flesh: Palimpsest
Let the music be your guide.Palimpsest is a novel from Catherynne M. Valente, released February 2009, and now said to have been way ahead of its time, with Queer main characters of many kinds. Quartered is its official companion album, and it will evolve and grow, a work in progress available via download only, begun as author and composer toured the United States together from February through summer 2009.
Previously…
The Nirvana Fallacy (or, Mania and Her Sophomore Slump) – Saint Louie
- #Feature Friday – Trauma Stew by Cynful Ukes
- Quartered: Songs of Palimpsest by S. J. Tucker
- Shapeshifer by Oblee #FeatureFriday
- Rayguns of Love by The Striped Bananas
- Mean Bone by Buzzard
- Aldona’s Daughter by Stunt Lover
- #FeatureFriday -Bandcamp Friday Issue
- #FeatureFriday – 1991 by Maisie Marra
- “Muay Thai Bag” by Foxcall
- A Place To Go When You Need To Hide by Rose Alaimo
- #FeatureFriday – And the Bones by Dr. Organ
- #FeatureFriday WIENER DEMEANOR by Cheer Captain
- #FeatureFriday – Effusion by Sweet Freeze
- Beginings Revisted by Jim France
- Recording in Progress by Aaron Smith
- Believer, a.k.a. The Last Shall Be the First
- Scrapyard Boyz: Ultra Despair Duo – Grizzly, Slogan
- The Nirvana Fallacy (or, Mania and Her Sophomore Slump) – Saint Louie
- The Cocker Spaniels Are Still Alive, And So Are You
- X by Everything’s a Crime
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