**1/2 Tara Jane O'Neil
PEREGRINE
(Columbia)
Tara Jane
O'Neil's musical meditations on Peregrine are so dreamy and amorphous
that listeners might want to reach into their stereos and just wrench the tunes
out of there. That is, until the oblique, impressionistic music tows them into
its altered, slo-mo state. Singer and multi-instrumentalist O'Neil was a force
in the influential Louisville band Rodan, who spawned a number of other
outfits, including O'Neil's next ensembles, Retsin and the Sonora Pine. She
wanders an arty, folky path on this release, which was apparently taped at
various apartments in New York City (including hers) in a fragmented manner
consistent with her gauzy aural sensibilities. Layers of gently droning
guitars, violin (from the Sonora Pine's Samara Lubelski), and other stringed
instruments drift in and out of view and form the backdrop for O'Neil's
plaintive but substantial vocals, which glimmer most alluringly on "The Fact of
a Seraph." Percussive accents come from Andrew Barker's brush strokes on a drum
set here and O'Neil's plinking thumb piano there.
-- Bill Kisliuk
|