Down in front and up on the stage, everybody’s wearing party hats, because Shara Worden, aka My Brightest Diamond, is in a festive mood. She’s dolled up all in black and white, accessorized in face paint and feathers and accompanied by an orchestra of similarly clad string and wind players. “Let’s get this party started right!” she exclaims, affecting a dialect more street than aria, and the crowd whoops. This is the first, but certainly not the last time that MBD would test her street cred tonight, in what quickly became a puzzling night, bizarrely colliding funk and freakshow, and straddling the borders between eccentricity, esoterica, and inside joke.
First things first: I didn’t know I was going to a party. Recorded, MBD is a cool peddler of musical mysticism, as curious and untouchable as a rare gem and just as marvelous. She inflects the idiosyncrasies of Bjork with the steely elegance of Portishead, creating music that is strong in its fragility, artistic in its whimsy, familiar and peculiar at the same time. Her voice is ethereal, even inspirational.
Live, MBD broke through this fantastical looking glass to reveal a self somewhat at odds with her mediated presentation. She opened the set with “Inside a Boy,” the opener off her latest record, A Thousand Shark’s Teeth. The vocals were improperly mixed at first, but even so it was immediately clear that her music becomes much more bottom-heavy in person–the thrust of the bass, guitar, and drums taking a much more aggressive place alongside the orchestra and her own delicate yet commanding singing. This rockier feeling betrayed what here became the almost overwhelming jazz and near-funk influences in her music–so much so that she and her musicians frequently broke out into herky-jerky dance moves that were more akin to spasms, involuntary twitches in time to the music, cooked up in the mind and served in the bodies of the caricatures of the weird.
I couldn’t say I was ready for all the dancing, or for the repeated forays in Ebonics she made in between numbers, or for just how off-putting MBD’s weirdness became over the course of the night. A trembling version of “The Diamond” segued into an unsettling yet wonderful version of Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” and even as I enjoyed its metallic and haunting finish, I couldn’t help but feel like it was some kind of joke for which I missed the set up. Later, “Disappear” turned into Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” as she ordered (in gangsta) her posse of orchestra geeks to start dancing. And that was it, really: a gang of misfits, creating their own crew in which she is the head. Those of us not on the inside may never understand its curious rules or funny handshakes.
I can’t help but think that the disconnect I experienced was yet another precipitate of an MP3/iPod culture, where we’re so used to listening to music in isolation that we not only forget that music has a social context, but we are bewildered by it when confronted. Never had I been so excited to see an artist live only to wish halfway through the show that I could go home. In another time and place, I might not have become a My Brightest Diamond fan at all, because I wouldn’t have felt welcome among her fans. I got to experience the unintended and paradoxical consequences of a new day: on the one hand, loving an artist deeply and personally, and on the other, feeling like I could not and would not get any closer to her.
image courtesy of musicsnobbery.com
Don’t have time to search out this week’s essential new music? That’s why we’re here.
Silver Jews “Strange Victory, Strange Defeat”
We’re instant fans of any song that opens with the line, “Squirrels imported from Connecticut, just in time for fall.” This one just happens to go above and beyond the call of duty with its jangly guitar refrain, shouted harmonies and the newly sober David Berman’s deadpan delivery. A winner!
Wolf Parade “Call It a Ritual”
A wobbly, woozy and thoroughly lovely taste from the Canadian indie rock heroes’ new album, At Mount Zoomer, driven by a pounding piano melody and stately vocals.
MP3: ”Call It a Ritual”
My Brightest Diamond “Inside a Boy”
Ever wanted to hear Bjork fronting Rush? The new album by classically trained vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Shara Worden might be the closest you get. The fact that she walks around with deer antlers on her head is just a bonus.
MP3: ”Inside a Boy”
Teddy Thompson “In My Arms”
Constant touring with fellow folk-rock offspring Rufus Wainwright has brought out the best in Richard and Linda Thompson’s kid, as evidenced by this lush ballad from his fourth and best album, A Piece of What You Need.
MP3: ”In My Arms”
Tilly and The Wall “Pot Kettle Black”
Proper, fuzz-guitar fueled garage rock from the Omaha, Nebraska fivesome’s third album, O. It’s like the lo-fi version of Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl.”
MP3: ”Pot Kettle Black”
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.