One minute, her voice quivers in quiet confidence, like a person singing a
lullaby to herself. Next minute, she’s singing “la la la” behind a kid’s
xylophone, frisky and chipper. And then Liz Janes growls, preens, struts,
pouts, scats, soothes. Her guitar plays all sorts of sounds: distorted notes,
atonal squeals, unreigned feedback. Lazy, confident leads fall on top of a
batch of perfectly wrong notes. Her songs bound around the studio, picking up
instruments of all sorts, stealing a line from "You Don’t Own Me," mixing banjos
and Casiotones, precise and sloppy, juxtaposed and akimbo. For the majority of
this album, the listener slides up and down the continuum of all musics that
remotely pertain to the genre of country, songs that shake and move just enough
to escape easy pigeonholing and easy accessibility.
And then "Tristeza," the 11th track, comes on. Liz Janes sings something about
drawing on paper. She plucks a simple, elemental melody on her guitar, while an
organ hums ominously in the background. And, in the chorus, she croons
"Tristeza, tristeza, tristeza," turning the I into two Es, the Z into an S,
hanging on the A ever so delicately. She sounds haunted and beautiful. A
chorus of “oooo”s float alongside a flute while the drummer dutifully taps the
cymbals and gently rolls across the snare. Every so often, this clanging sound
emerges, like the loud hum of insects cutting through the dark heat of an
unbearable summer night. Following the song's conclusion, a gentle instrumental
leads into a brief reprise of "Tristeza." The reprise is played on a piano,
hazy, fingers running up and down the keys like cascading water. It's as if the
song never actually ended.
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