This is Shara Worden’s third LP as My Brightest Diamond. It’s a presentation of high camp, and a restrained boldness of vision that is far removed from the mainstream. There are a couple of areas that might turn people off. Firstly that it toys with pastiche. There’s a potpourri of Edwardian popular music, Piaf, carny and show-tunes in here. But it remains unique enough to convince.
Secondly, you could find Worden’s voice too cold, too mannered, too aware of its own power and beauty to draw you in with vulnerability. In fact, Worden’s voice may be the least expressive aspect of the whole record. However, don’t think of this as a weakness. Susan Sontag talked about camp as proposing “a comic vision of the world … comedy is an experience of under-involvement, of detachment.” The way that Worden narrows the field of expressivity in her voice somehow puts the whole project into quotation marks – a well-known technique of Brecht and Weill in the 30s.
It’s this tension that will make this album flex sinuously around your heart – cold vocal delivery over a multi-textured fantasia of sound. yMusic, who provide the stunning orchestrations that underpin nearly all of these songs, invoke magical soundscapes, woodwind heavy fluttering of wings, rich and sonorous strings, exotic gamelans. Somewhere between Harry Partch and the music of Joanna Newsom, they paint a picture in sound that comes around once in a blue moon.
There are plenty of highlights. The hugely enjoyable allegory There’s a Rat is a most charming critique of our present global collapse. High Low Middle carries forward the spirit of Kurt Weill shot through with an end-of-the-universe panache. The arrangements leave nothing unexplored, and revel in their complexity. Be Brave, the epic single, digs the torch in deep until the flames reach skyward. I Have Never Loved Someone makes us feel as warm and drippy as can be.
You can’t take this album at face value, and that’s why we like it. It forces you to listen to it at one remove, to take a position on it. Clever, arch pop music never sounded so good.
-Julian Tardo-
