By It’s our Bandcamp Picks of the Week, featuring Lizzie No’s folksy concept album HALFSIES and Total Blue’s distilled self-titled new age album!
Lizzie No – HALFSIES
Genre: Folk, Americana
Favorite Tracks: “Lagunita,” “The Heartbreak Store,” “Shield and Sword”
By most metrics, concept albums signify the most excessive and kitschy aspects of being a musical artist. History has produced obvious exceptions like ZIGGY STARDUST, RED HEADED STRANGER, and EL MAL QUERER, which clock in at under 45 minutes, but by and large, the concept album is this ghastly behemoth born from noxious vanity and a lack of restraint, chronicling such disparate ideas as the downfall of mankind or the futility of love. HALFSIES, as its title unintentionally hints at, establishes itself as that rare exception: a concept built around compromise.
The concept behind HALFSIES is a simple one: it’s a video game. At first blush, the correlation feels off. Our presence is passive to the narrative which plays out. The protagonist of the piece (Miss Freedomland) is static to our whims, predestined to take the path set out by their creator rather than us lesser gods. If we look past the obvious bluster and our urge to label Lizzie No pretentious, the video game comparison actually makes sense. With the exception of certain open world RPGs and sandbox games, the player doesn’t actually have any control over the outcome of the game. We just run through the levels and let the story progress until we come to the final boss or give up along the way out of frustration.
While Lizzie No’s press statements about HALFSIES offer a certain profundity about the human condition and the rat race we run through, the actual “story” of Miss Freedomland’s journey from exile into liberation feels like an afterthought. It’s as though No chose to make a compromise with either their collaborators or listeners to expunge the narrative in favor of accessibility. Most people would bemoan such a choice, but HALFSIES mostly benefits from being a concise “Americana” album first and foremost. The themes enrich the experience, but at the end of the day, most listeners are here for the tunes, and Lizzie No delivers them in spades. The title track, with its bells and tight harmonies (courtesy of Allison Russel), feels akin to accepting the oncoming apocalypse with grace, its chorus being equal parts jubilant yet also unsettling. “Lagunita” sees the singer-songwriter going into full rock mode, tapping into her inner Lucinda Williams, delivering iconic riffs and vocal hooks throughout. “Shield and Sword” taps into the world of bluegrass with its prominent use of mandolin and breezy atmosphere, all while using video game imagery to convey a sense of defeat. “Deadbeat” is one of several songs which utilizes Lizzie No’s harp skills to maximum effect, showing how well it can work within an “Americana” setting. And album closer “Babylon” serves as a fitting conclusion and nice encapsulation of the album’s themes and sonic palette with its blend of Knopfler-esque electric guitar work with lush string quartet.
Though it’s easy to view the story of Miss Freedomland as an undergrad’s first draft in a creative writing workshop, it’s arguably more of a source text for listeners to spin their own narrative (or in video game terms, a means for programmers to build mods on). Looking at HALFSIES through this lens adds further meaning to an already vibrant album which cements Lizzie No as a towering “Americana” musician who can jump across genres with ease. If you haven’t already, listen to it on Bandcamp. [Connor Shelton]
Total Blue – S/T
Genre: Ambient, New Age
Favorite Tracks: “Jaguarundi, “Dorian Dial,” “Corsair”
Underneath TOTAL BLUE’s heady, holistic rhythms lies an extremely physical and tactile experience. Each individual note or solitary passage seems to evaporate immediately, the bubbling, tubular sound transposing into some kind of hazy, technicolor mist. The Los Angeles-based trio of Nicky Benedek, Alex Talan, and Anthony Calonico distill both the purity and the atmosphere of PURE MOODS into a downtempo ambient release that captures and updates that hypnotic new age energy.
The liner notes describe TOTAL BLUE as “the all-encompassing full picture, a place where the real and the imaginary begin to blur; a destination reached not through escapism but by expanding one’s perspective; a widened scope of vision where personality both shines and disintegrates.” And if anything I’ve said or the band have said about the project feels hyperbolic, I urge you to throw some headphones on and meditate with it yourself; the pulsating synths and ethereal vibrations—both musical and in some way spiritual—are intense but welcoming. From the fuzzy walkabout “Dorian Dial” to the buoyant alien dispatch of “Pearl Plains,” Benedek, Talan, and Calonico have sparsely crafted something corporeal, music you can without exaggeration feel changing you from the inside out as you listen to it. TOTAL BLUE is a prayer, a reflection, and a reverie, all at once. You can check it out over on Bandcamp. [CJ Simonson]
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