Tara Jane O'Neil - In the Sun Lines
(Quarterstick)
Tara Jane O'Neil is a musician whose resume is pretty great. Playing in Retsin, Sonora Pine, and Rodan earned her quite a name and built up a good deal of anticipation for her first solo album early last year. It was the best thing she had done since Rodan by far. It took her deeply rooted style that was always present in each of her projects and bared it down, showing her enormous talent for songwriting.
This year's album, In the Sun Lines, follows the same path, deviating little from the niche she has carved out of the wall of rock music. It features mostly the same revolving cast of friends from The Sonora Pine, Retsin, and Ida helping out with various instruments on the songs. The mood is as somber and reserved, and if she has pushed her songwriting to go further, it seems to have been pushed towards a steady retreat inward, with more dissonance and more sullen meandering. The highlight, "High Wire," which shows up right in the middle of the album, lifts the mood a bit with its lilting vocals, which against the backdrop of her usual near-mumble sounds almost empassioned.
The last two tracks show the biggest progression from her first album. "New Harm" ends with a growing sea of tones, swelling and bubbling and taking over the song, ending as a collage of sound. The last track, "A Noise is the Head," is a harsher, randomly noisy song.
The added ambience on the last two songs is hardly enough to call this album much of a change from what she did on her last album, but with the strength and power of these songs, O'Neil shows just how unimportant it is to reinvent yourself when the songs are this good.
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