Heather Leigh - I Abused Animal
Tiny Mix Tapes 60
Heather Leigh
I Abused Animal
Rating:
When we talk about the long and storied history of songwriters sitting down, singing, and playing the guitar, we’re often talking about people using music as a form of dealing with pain. Of course, there’s a colorful spectrum of artists out there, but the solo guitar is classically viewed as a vehicle for channeling the musician’s sorrow. This can be comforting in its universality, but also challenging to the artist. Guitar music has covered quite an expanse in the past century, and isn’t part of expressing one’s suffering putting it in terms that are meaningful and specific to that person? Isn’t the point of speaking up to add one’s voice to the conversation?
In her interview with TMT back in 2009, Heather Leigh spoke on this subject: “I’ve touched on negative ideas and feelings in the past. I consider that a full circle from positive things as well, but I definitely like to think of what I’m doing as more celebratory than negative.” She brings up an important point. Although someone like Stephen O’Malley, Bill Orcutt, or Robert Johnson may be tearing head on into their own darkness when they play, what they find is ultimately a kind of redemptive energy, a source of power in their grief that turns their act into a kind of joyful exorcism. True, unbridled pain is a state as cathartic as any bliss, and to see an artist tap into that feeling in such a naked way is to witness a new method of emotional release.
Heather Leigh’s past explorations of pain have been both disorienting (2007’s Devil If You Can Hear Me) and enveloping (this year’s Nightingale), but this time, on I Abused Animal, she dissolves her misery into a fine, translucent dust. Leigh’s primary mode of shredding comes via the slide guitar, an instrument that she’s mangled alongside the likes of underground heavies like Chris Corsano, Peter Brötzmann, and Jandek, and her newest release comes courtesy of Editions Mego’s Stephen O’Malley-fronted Ideologic Organ imprint. On I Abused Animal, her playing is sparser than sparse, leaving ample room for her quivering, deep vocal style; even when she does crank it up, as on “All That Heaven Allows” or “The Return,” there is still an overpowering feeling of emptiness, an evident lack of textures surrounding her buzzsaw guitar that she can’t hope to fill. Oftentimes she’s content to let one spidery riff circle the drain endlessly (“Quicksand”) and more than once she goes completely a cappella, an effect that would normally lend an album a sense of intimacy, but I Abused Animal seems resistant to emotional refuge.
Despite how she may have felt about her music at the time of that interview, there is nothing celebratory about I Abused Animal. Most of these songs consist entirely of a single musical phrase repeated ad nauseam, with little adjustment in dynamic from start to finish throughout their consistently long runtime. Rather than giving herself room to delve deep within the anguish she describes in these pieces, Leigh ends up merely floating above the surface of it, creating a kind of music that hints at emotional ruin but ends up being surprisingly passive. Perhaps what I Abused Animal is striving for is the feeling of numbness, the total lack of response that comes from a lifetime of abuse, yet this album doesn’t speak directly about that type of pain either. Numbness is a retreat for victims precisely because it is a more comfortable place to be than suffering, tragic as it may be. Leigh’s performance throughout I Abused Animal ends up closer to a kind of middling discomfort, not brutal enough to elicit a strong response, not graceful enough to allow tender personal connection.
But then, there is the transformative, unspeakably terrific closing track “Fairfield Fantasy.” As a finale, “Fairfield Fantasy” fulfills all the promise of I Abused Animal, a gentle, moving requiem that utilizes Leigh’s vocals and the slide guitar’s distinct abilities to drown the listener in a melancholic sea of phantom vibrations. Here, Leigh’s vision is rendered in glorious detail: a refined enhancement on her previous work, a full-fledged song that moves in sections without losing its hypnotizing and formless morbidity. Even if Leigh’s performance is a wilted one, it taps into a very real sense of loss, a desolation that purifies as much as it annihilates. While I Abused Animal is too cruel an album to find any kind of conventional joy in, I’m excited to see where she’ll continue to take her undeniably idiosyncratic voice in the future.
01. I Abused Animal
02. Quicksand
03. All That Heaven Allows
04. Passionate Reluctance
05. The Return
06. Fairfield Fantasy
The Quietus 0
For an album that is, in essence, very stripped-down and direct (one woman singing and playing the lap steel guitar), I Abused Animal is possibly the most mysterious one I've heard all year. Heather Leigh hails from the coal mining part of West Virginia, but has lived in Scotland for many a year, and has somehow managed to coalesce the most primordial, intangible elements of both locales' musical tradition into a work of art that is wholly unique as to defy such pat words as "folk", "noise" or "drone". I Abused Animal is all of those and none of them and, whilst it draws on the free improvisation tradition she has long been associated with through collaborations with the likes of Peter Brötzmann, Thurston Moore and Chris Corsano, it transcends them entirely in ways that are unexpected and mystifying.
The title track, which opens the album, is a case in point. Taking cues from the verbal folk tradition when songs were transmitted between individuals, even generations by listening to, rather than reading, music, Leigh displays the full range of her impressive vocal power by singing a capella, bolstered only by the shadow of her own multi-tracked voice as it forms a wordless ghostly choir behind her. The lyrics are opaque and somewhat sinister, a tale of regretted violence, Leigh's voice wracked with emotion as the song develops gently into a haunted murder ballad that could have just as easily been beamed out of 1880s Appalachia as 13th century Highland wilds. The lap steel makes its first appearance on 'Quicksand', a few muted, plucked notes looping around Leigh as she stretches her vocals into the upper register. Where a lot of footage of Leigh's concert performances, notably as part of Annihilating Light with ex-Skullflower guitarist Stefan Jaworzyn, show her coaxing cascades of vicious noise and feedback from her guitar, here it is decidedly secondary to the vocals, another nod to folk tradition, even if her playing is very much a minimalist style all of Leigh's own. It's hard to describe how radiant her voice is on 'Quicksand', and indeed across I Abused Animal, for there are few comparable singers, but at a push would suggest a cross between Anne Briggs at her most ethereal with the power and poise of Jessika Kenney.
I Abuse Animal is deceptively, almost surreptitiously expansive, the apparent minimalism of 'Quicksand' building gently into a spacey ballad with echoes of Popol Vuh or electric Dylan at his most esoteric, but these shades of added texture require multiple listens to discern. Leigh unleashes the sturm und drang on the third track, 'All That Heaven Allows', a Haino-esque solo rocker that neatly juxtaposes her crystalline voice with hard-riffing, bluesy guitar mulch. It's probably the most superficially "American" of the tracks, with its nods to electric folk and the blues, whilst also evoking that Englishman in Scottish exile, Richard Youngs. The most intimate track is the brief 'Passionate Reluctance' (has there ever been a better evocation of love and lust's many contradictions?), another solo vocal piece, which fades into the exquisite slow burning noise/folk of 'The Return'. Here, all rock archetypes are stripped away in favour of a churning, repetitive non-riff that slowly plods forwards as Leigh's voice swoops and soars overhead. When she hits the high notes, I guarantee shivers will follow. For a final flourish, Leigh returns to more easily identifiable territory with another emotionally wrenching electric ballad, 'Fairfield Fantasy', a watery, warped journey into imagined realms, with her lap steel wavering between country twang and Hawaiian surf. It's a fittingly bizarre, sparse and yet somehow multilayered masterpiece of subtlety.
Like the entirety of I Abused Animal, 'Fairfield Fantasy' defies categorisation and genre conventions, starting somewhere in the folk territory of a Judee Sill or Karen Dalton, but slowly, imperceptibly edging towards the unknown and the mysterious. Even hundreds of listens in, I can't quite put my finger on why I Abused Animal is so wondrous, but it is, and Heather Leigh has emerged from centuries of tradition and the improv world she is most closely associated with, to deliver a work of art that exists in a world all of its own.
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Fri May 27 00:00:00 GMT 2016