Rio En Medio
(Manimal Vinyl)
Rio En Medio's Danielle Stech-Homsy has one of pop music's most wispy and delicate voices, a thread of melody that slips into and under gossamer textures of guitar, synthetic blips and field recordings. Her first album, The Bride of Dynamite in 2007, set her ethereal template, with dreamlike lyrics wrapped in crinkled tissue layers of sound. With Frontier, she has turned a shade more electronic, a bit less faerie-magic folky, with the blurts and wheeze of synthesizer percolating under clear currents of song.
This second album was recorded mostly in Stech-Homsy's northern New Mexico home, with the singer herself doing programming, and playing an array of synthesizers, a ukulele, harmonium and percussion. She was joined, on occasion, by other players, most notably Chris Taylor of Grizzly Bear. He produced "Ferris" in his Brooklyn studio, and added flute and clarinet to its unearthly atmospherics.
Yet even so, the album has an aura of deep solitude, of daydreams made substantial through long periods of alone-ness, of fragile radio transmissions that hint at a living world somewhere. Bride of Dynamite's "Liberté," with its long, mysterious samples, prefigures her fascination with altered real-world sounds. "The Last Child's Tear" opens with birdsong that unexpectedly changes into space-age whirrs and gurgles; these unlooked for embellishments remain even as the water-pure, folk-simple melody begins, adding a strange sheen of science to it.
The disc's longest song is also its most experimental, the first-side closer "Venus of Willendorf," based on a 13th century poem. Yet though it highlights Stech-Homsy's restless intelligence, her willingness to subvert beauty, her preference for atmosphere over structure, the song sags over its long featureless duration. There is just not enough architecture in the song to support it, and it collapses into a series of mildly interesting, synthetically derived sounds. Far better, if less ambitious, are songs like "Frontier," "Heartless" and "Ferris," which turn soft folk into eerie dreamscapes, without losing the thread of meaning.
Standout Tracks: "Frontier," "Heartless" JENNIFER KELLY
