The trembling majesty that is Shara Worden, aka My Brightest Diamond, is something you are not ready for. Meeting her takes openness and commitment and it takes muscle and acceptance. It takes following her into troubled geographies, her voice wailing like the wind, sometimes it whistling impossibly, birdishly high. Quirks of noise–Was that a toy piano? Is that humming I hear? What are those drums?–add to the disorienting effect of her mystical lyrics, like the fairy tales of another dimension. Let me liken My Brightest Diamond, then, to Alice in Wonderland: a girl with a dreamy and often eerie story, but whose world is deliciously mesmerizing and, once you believe with her, utterly inescapable.
Beyond the storybook Alice, I hesitate to relate her to any musical kin–not because the reference points are not there, but because they seem reductive. To say she has the intensity of Beth Gibbons, or that she displays more grounded, darkened versions of Joanna Newsom’s idiosyncrasies are both certainly true, but they do not adequately prepare you for the inevitable chill that will follow your spine during the enchantment that is “To Pluto’s Moon.” It is a song that opens as quietly as breathing, building from that nucleus on waves that are equal parts cosmic and orchestral, betraying at once her classical training and her wisdom about the breadth of sound. Its grooving, almost muscular bass lines provide the roots against which her voice is allowed free rein to lilt or grovel. “Why did you go like this?” she sings, and against the passionate music she has created, I want to know, too.
A Thousand Shark’s Teeth (Asthmatic Kitty, 2008), her second album, concentrates the promise of her 2006 release album Bring Me the Workhorse. There are no freak-outs here, not even caged wildness. Instead, you hear and feel control–that of a spinning top that’s furiously turning in the same spot, or a drill that burrowing a deep, narrow cavity right into your mind, your soul, your heart. When it hits you there, for the first time, there’s nothing you could have done to anticipate it.
