Alias & Tarsier
Brookland/Oaklyn CD/LP (Anticon.)
- Cub
- Rising Sun
- Last Nail
- Dr. C
- Anon
- 5 Year Eve
- Every Plane That Draws a White Line
- Luck & Fear w/Dose One
- Picking the Same Lock
- Ligaya
'Cub' begins Brookland/Oaklyn with a smile. The album's first song enters with a light and steady pulse, a slow build of entwined keys, and Tarsier's rich and dulcet voice singing of a child's unhindered love for life. She plays the chanteuse, drawing the listener in while Alias coaxes the song out its shell, gradually building it up and coating the entire thing with a fine layer of frost. Tarsier's transcendent voice breathes icy air as the smile turns down at its corners and rolls into Rising Sun, a lyrical ode to metamorphosis. Off-kilter drums, loops and chopped static set the tone and a jeweled synth line announces the return of our heroine. Here Alias returns to the hard drums and boom-bap-infused atmospheres which tinted Muted; Tarsier walks a beautiful line somewhere between Bjork and Beth Gibbons.
On 'Last Nail' Alias finds his voice again, delivering his rapid rhyme-free cadence over a beat that scurries to keep up with him, and on 'Anon' Tarsier harmonizes over a dark and noirish score that life is only realized through love and wounds. Elsewhere, we're lifted upward by bright acoustic guitar ( 'Dr. C' featuring the strumming of anticon's Telephone Jim Jesus), kited across the midnight sky by the strings of a cello ('5 Year Eve' featuring Kirsten McCord of Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace! label), and brought down to the ground when faced with mortality's heavy coil ('Luck & Fear' with Subtle/13 & God/ Themselves' Dose One).
"Plane that draws a white line" has Alias' acoustic guitar patiently plucking through New York and California thunderstorms while Tarsier folk-croons, "I'm happy not the fastest..."
And, an illegal immigrant's feelings of entrapment are chronicled in "Picking the Same Lock" (lyrically inspired by the indie-doc film, "The Edge of America"), featuring subtle/themselves' Dax Pierson on keyboards.
All in all, the result is a powerful send-up on behalf of their own honest music manifesto: a project dreamt up and made human by a kindred pair 3000 miles apart.
