Audie Darling Full of Ghosts
(Self-Released)
[GOOD-SAD ACOUSTIC] Seldom are the days when I wake up in the morning and think, “I’d like to listen to slow, sad acoustic music today.” But Portlanders seem to have an endless appetite for it, because the stuff floods my mailbox daily. So I listen. Sometimes, as was the case with Audie Darling’s new disc, Full of Ghosts, I’m glad I did.
Though the record is loaded with notable contributors (like local singer-songwriter Leonard Mynx and Norfolk Western frontman Adam Selzer), Darling’s voice is the driving force of this collection. She’s a sure and strong narrator, with control over not just the notes she sings but the feel behind them. Through her confidence and toughness, she retains the honey-stick sweetness and desperate twang of a small-town waitress aching to leave. Darling asks her listeners to buck up (“You just stretch your legs/ Come on outside/ Leave your old poetry and predictions for the end of time,” she sings on “Clouds Roll Around”) as often as she pouts, and chooses to capture the delicate details of life’s fleeting moments over repeating coffeeshop love song clichés.
I’m forgiving Darling for tracking the similar-sounding “Stars in My Hair” and “Worn Out Shoe” back to back, and for throwing a bit too much of her Nashville-native twang atop the maybes in “Just Maybe.” She has a voice I don’t mind following through tough times. So, for those mornings when I do wake up with an itch for some sad acoustic songs, Darling’s ought to do the trick.
The Headless Heroes The Silence of Love
(Headless Heroes)
[THE LATE GREATS] If one had to criticize excellent Portland/Nevada City, Calif., folk chanteuse Alela Diane for something, it’d be that sometimes she’s just a bit too Alela Diane. The delicate mystery of her songs, those rusting shards of overgrown Americana, reflect onto the psychedelic folkie herself, and it’s hard to imagine Diane outside of her hand-crafted bubble.
Hearing Diane break character with the Headless Heroes—in a musical landscape largely removed from her bare-bones, macabre compositions—challenges the singer-songwriter’s very essence, a tricky experiment and possible risky career move for Diane. The Heroes (a supergroup of sorts brought together by producer Eddie Bezalel) is more like a house band than a vanity project, and debut The Silence of Love—a collection of covers from Nick Cave to Daniel Johnston—finds the band morphing into different shapes for each track. And as strange as it is hearing Diane sing lyrics she’d never write for herself (“I’ll be a plastic toy for you,” from the Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey” seems out of character), the dusty psych rock behind her brings it all together. From the finger-picked heartache of late troubadour Jackson C. Frank’s “Blues Run the Game” to the elaborately orchestrated, Velvet Underground-esque closer “See My Love,” Diane stretches her spirit and voice to match the energy of the room.
The Silence of Love is more a beautifully curated mixtape of lost greats than a traditional album, with themes of travel and loss holding the songs together. But instead of a mixed bag of vocalists over the album’s hauntingly familiar tracks, we get Diane. What a gift!
SEE IT: Audie Darling plays Saturday, May 16, at Mississippi Studios. 7 pm. $15. 21+. The Headless Heroes’
The Silence of Love comes out Tuesday, May 19.
