There is something unaccountably beautiful about the sound of a human voice singing with itself. Given that this is a physical impossibility made real by recording technology, you might think it would offend our human instincts (the aural equivalent of what Roger Ebert calls the Uncanny Valley, where computer-generated people look too much like real people), but I think the layering of a single voice speaks to our ideas about expression: That our voices are weak, our expressive capacity insufficient to the volumes of things we want to say, and that if we owned more than one voice, we might come closer to revealing all of our feelings.
Glasser’s Ring capitalizes on this idea, so much so that it could almost be called a concept album about the multitudes within an individual. The album’s voices belong to Cameron Mesirow, whose tones are penetrating even in isolation, and a symphony unto themselves when suddenly liberated from singularity. Opening track “Apply” presents us with two separate melodies, which alternate for the duration and then, at the triumphant final moment, converge. This coalescence of Mesirows results in a timbre as rich as the deeply resonant sound that serves as their backdrop (distorted sarangi*, I’m guessing, an instrument that reappears often and is another key element of Ring’s unique architecture). The album doesn’t show its hand immediately, but when the finale of “Apply” hits, Ring announces in a major way exactly what kind of record it’s going to be.
You can hear a similar intertwining of similar registers in the music of School of Seven Bells, but I think the mystique is less when you know those voices belong to two different people (sisters, in fact). Maybe this has more to do with my personal preferences than with the inherent virtues of Glasser relative to those of her peers. Most of the music I’ve been most interested in these past few years has been made by solo artists. I still listen to and love bands, but I’ve begun to wonder more and more, how can one experience the modern world through anything but a subjective pair of eyes (or ears)?
Anyway, for all my emphasis on the vocals of Ring, the meaning of these songs is not necessarily in their words, but in the… emotional coloring. Ring has earned comparisons to Bat for Lashes’ Two Suns, and rightly so, but it’s a work of abstract expressionism next to that album’s Renaissance portraiture. Two Suns was about, quite literally, a woman who cannot live without a true love, but if that woman exists on Ring (and I suspect she does), she’s found in the shapes, the colors, the patterns, and in the sighs. And true, what we respond to most in this kind of music is the color, and both of these albums are shaded in the deep red of a beating heart.
This is a remarkable debut, from a woman who is just beginning to discover how much she has to say. There’s much more to uncover on Ring (True Panther’s press release for the record suggests that it “builds on the tradition of classic albums like Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, and R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet song-cycle,” and that it’s named for the chiastic, or “ring,” structure, “an idea borrowed from the oral tradition” in which “ideas are paired in a symmetric order, often leading bi-directionally toward a central idea,” etc.), but for now I’m sufficiently fascinated by the voices.
- – -
*Indian instrument whose name means “hundred colors,” and which is said to most resemble the sound of the human voice.
