ENTR'ACTE: Azita's Detail from the Mountain Side |
No one familiar with Azita Youssefi’s previous band, Chicago’s prescient neo-no-wave Scissor Girls, could have foreseen her solo work’s sharp veer toward piano-based art song. This EP continues down that path, despite its cross-media provenance; all five songs were written to accompany a 2005 play by Brian Torrey Scott, with lyrics by the author. Although that’s billed as a “musical,” the snatches of dialogue and stage direction included in the liner notes suggest Godot-plus-slide-projections, and it would be hard to mistake these song koans for the Wicked OCR. “Intro” sets Torrey’s battle-of-the-elements abstractions (“All the fire is killed by water”) to melodic leaps recalling Joni Mitchell circa Shadows and Light; “Evaporation” traces a knotty chromatic tune in bare unison with a keyboard line. “Tangly” toys with conventional-pop form as Azita’s backing trio (with special credit to guitarist Emmett Kelly) chugs along in garage-rock mode — though I can’t remember any Nuggets cuts that begin, “William James spoke of the waves of consciousness.” At a trim 12 minutes, this release won’t satisfy listeners awaiting a full-dress follow-up to 2004’s compound-eye-opening Life on the Fly, but it’s an enjoyable entr’acte.On the Web
Azita: http://www.azita.info/
