Stuart A. Staples and Marc Leclair
By Bernardo Rondeau
Stuart A. Staples
Leaving Songs
(Beggars Banquet)
Rating: 3 out of 5 rock-ons
The title of Stuart A. Staples’ second solo album rather boldly infers not only ‘moving on’ but also ‘moving out.’ Specifically, Staples breaks away from the musty clutter and chamber melancholy of Tindersticks—the English sextet he has fronted for nearly 15 years now. Having followed their rather lackluster 2003 LP Waiting for the Moon with a greatest-hits collection and subsequent reissues of their early masterpieces, the band seemed to be closing an era. This impression of finality has become even more pronounced considering the three-year silence since the band’s last album and, now, the release of Leaving Songs.
“Old Friends No. 1†opens the disc with Staples alone but for a loaded ashtray and his thoughts of opportunities missed and times past, crooning over a masterful arrangement that, over its six minutes, evokes his main band at their best. Staples’ acoustic guitar keeping rhythm, a rushing, brushed snare and lolloping piano are soon met with layers of shimmering xylophone notes, cooing organ lines, a chorus of female voices and triumphant brass. What differentiates this crowded, music-room romp from the Tindersticks’ usual fare may be Staples’ command—he hasn’t sounded this focused and vital in years. He still sings in his inimitable voice—a slightly pinched, consonant-swallowing bass with a velvet lining—of soured love and lonesome reveries, but now it seems he’s not pondering amid a late-night red wine haze but a mid-morning espresso flash. In its perfectly compact 37 minutes of duets with Maria McKee and Lhasa de Sela—both ladies playing the role long perfected by Isabella Rossellini on the ‘Sticks’ song “A Marriage Made in Heaven,†with its sad-eyed honky-tonks, empty room blues and driving rain rollicks—Staples crafts a graceful song cycle on loss and change bustling with lush, instrumental intricacies.
Marc Leclair
Musique Pour 3 Femmes Enceintes
(Mutek)
Rating: 4 out of 5 rock-ons
Best known for his micro-managed stentorian cut-ups as Akufen, Montreal’s Marc Leclair traces the full natal gestation in just over 71 minutes of dust-clung, bit-map bliss on his excellent new album (in English, its name translating to Music For 3 Pregnant Women). Conceived as a single, long-playing composition sliced into distinct segments, each of which stands for a month of pregnancy as evinced not only by the fact that there are nine tracks total but—as Leclair makes clear though his titles—the music elapses in seconds and minutes so macrocosmically that the sense of broader swaths of time slipping by is made apparent. Specifically, the disc opens on day one and rounds out on the birth date of the 274th day.
Due to its subject matter, the album is suitably watery—its sleeve depicting a basketball hoop emerging from an oceanic expanse while brooks babble and skies rain on some of Leclair’s laptop daydreams. But in its very form, Musique Pour 3 Femmes Enceintes is rather similar to tidal activity: rippling currents of sound fading away to reveal strange expanses of exposed topography. Each tone impeccably burnished, tweaked and/or trimmed, Leclair then sends them scurrying in cellular rhythms. Refracted acoustic guitar shards blend with slashes of ham radio interference; garbled pixels mesh into clipped rubber-ball bounce, all the while undulating on weightless currents. Whether swimming in its whirling flow through headphones or letting the whole room soak in its marine abstractions, Musique Pour 3 Femmes Enceintes allows the listener to join its titular trio of mothers in experiencing womb-life from the inside.