Deradoorian - The Expanding Flower Planet

Pitchfork 80

Angel Deradoorian's debut album is full of unusual juxtapositions: '60s psych and Georgian polyphony; classical minimalism and laser-show maximalism; dulcimer and church organ. But her voice is the thread that holds it all together, and once the album has finished, tied off with a ribbon of wailing trombone, it's her voice you remember most. Crystalline and unerring in pitch, it dominates the album, both solo and in multi-tracked close harmonies that radiate an eerie glow, like pyrite glinting through fog. It's not hard to imagine that an a capella version of this album would be captivating all on its own.

This is Deradoorian's debut solo album, but she has played a key role in a number of arty, ambitious indie rock projects: She played bass and sang in Dave Longstreth's Dirty Projectors in the Bitte Orca years, and she's one third of Avey Tare's Slasher Flicks, the most recent side project of Animal Collective's Dave Portner. As a singer, she's also worked with Vampire Weekend, Charli XCX, Flying Lotus, U2, and Matmos, a list that suggests an unusually robust versatility. She began releasing her own music in 2009, with the Mind Raft EP, but the new album represents a quantum leap in complexity and ambition. The Expanding Flower Planet feels like an album full of trap doors, where a single, unexpected sound can deposit you into new worlds.

Playing the bulk of the music herself, with help from two drummers and a handful of backup vocalists, Deradoorian explores krautrock rhythms, microtonal tunings, and various Eastern scales, including those of her Armenian heritage. And she lets those scales dictate a melodic line that takes her far away from the hidebound formula of indie's usual four-bar chord changes. "A Beautiful Woman" begins as a garage-soul rave-up and then explodes into the eerie, cascading harmonies of the Black Sea region; "Your Creator" stacks ghostly chords to the heavens and trips up and down their intervals, a dizzying game of chutes and ladders.

The album's title comes from a Chinese mandala tapestry that hung in Deradoorian's studio, and, accordingly, she wrestles with big, metaphysical themes: elemental forces, catacombs and mosaics, hearts and eyes, clutching and binding, love and knowledge, and above all, oneness. The theme of self-actualization runs from the first song's daily affirmations ("Beautiful woman/ You're the one I wanna be") to the last song's healing mantra ("Love/ Grow/ Love… Grow grow grow grow grow"). But the focus is rarely narrative; the lyrics tend to operate like koans, spells, small tokens supercharged with symbolic power. The quest for knowledge drives it all. "How do you know?/ Who can tell the truth?" asks "DarkLord". In the title song she sings, "We all know much more than we really think we know," and in "Grow", that idea becomes a question:" How do we learn so we can all teach?"

And then there's "Komodo", probably the only song you'll hear this year that seems at least nominally to be about a Komodo dragon attack ("Komodo coming through/ Run for your lives/ Run for the hills/ Don't close your eyes"). It contains some of the album's most vivid lyrics, particularly in a cooing chorus whose dulcet tone contradicts its stark imagery ("Drone/ Between the grass/ The blades are rough/ Your metal skin/ Protects your hunt/ Death is in your clutch"). Despite this reptilian foray, though, the album's wide-angled macro perspective suggests that Deradoorian's true spirit animal is likelier to be a hawk or an eagle.

There is an aching sense of space in her music: with her soaring vocals leading the way, her arrangements begin to suggest patchworks of fields and freeways and mountains and beaches as seen from above. "I love the beauty of the state, but there's a whole other aspect of it that I struggle with," she told Self-Titled magazine of her attempt to come to grips with California's sprawl. As she wends her unpredictable way up and away, through strange intros and outros and across mantra-like choruses and far above bridges to nowhere, she offers a bird's-eye view of a landscape unlike any other, a place at once familiar, as though half-remembered from a dream, and spellbindingly alien.