Might have an adorable moniker, but theres nothing cute about her music. Lady Lamb, more conventionally known as Aly Spaltro, has fearlessly conquered huge stages, having played SXSW and opened for the likes of venerable guitarist Kaki King. Now the 20-something old soul has boiled down her numerous bedroom recordings into one equally audacious debut record, Ripely Pine.Spaltros two biggest assets are her fearsome pipes and intricate lyrics, and Ripely Pine displays both with rich flavor. A mix of new tracks and burnished live-set standards, the album has an earnest, arts and crafts feel, the tracks as varied in style as they are in length. The disc starts off contemplative on Hair to the Ferris Wheel and ends in the smoldering ruins of Taxidermist, Taxidermist. In between, Ripely Pine explodes into a constellation of emotions: joy, desire, regret, sadness, anger — the experience of being a twenty-something in 2013, detailed in such powerful poetry that our own youthful writings pale in comparison.Aubergine re-creates those tumultuous feelings in its structure. Spaltro starts with a quick-fire alliterative line, building one decibel louder on each word as she sings, bursting into full-hearted, open-throated glory by the third line.
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She backs off a bit on the chorus but grows each line as it repeats. Absence makes my heart grow hollow, she intones, almost hollering by the end.The doors really blow off on Crane Your Neck. Spaltro lets her voice turn into an ugly, courageous bellow that mirrors the same courage the protagonist needs. Youve got to be starving for it / And if youre crying by the moon, in the sun you better lift up that chin, she cries before she offers a solution: Twist your hips / Crane your neck. Salvation by way of dance music.“Bird Balloons” lies along that same open vein, lines like It was a fragile thing and I goddamn dropped it throbbing with the pain of young love and loss. Elsewhere, heavier arrangements envelop some of her emotion (Aubergine is still a heartbreaker, but if you think you like it now, catch it live and brace yourself), but Bird Balloons makes good use of production to ratchet up the drama.Her weird, wonderful poetry weaves through the album, a super-saturated thread of love and mortification that unites all the diverse styles into one cohesive record. I still need your teeth round my organs, she begs on You Are The Apple. Her opposite in Regarding Ascending the Stairs, handled me like an infant skull / and I cradled you like a newborn nightmare. Shes more plain elsewhere: Its a goddamn joke how we can hurt even in the sun, she baldly cries on Crane Your Neck.While it may have the wild enthusiasm of a youthful art project, Ripely Pine lacks the scattershot results that such an approach often entails. Quiet moments do not suffer from lack of drama; Florence Berlin is a dignified, folksy lullaby, the prettiest example of Spaltros vocal prowess, while seven-minute epic You Are The Apple breaks down uptempo guitar and reforms into several distinct movements.
Admittedly, after being quite a fan of Aly Spaltro's (Lady Lamb's) first album ('Mammoth Swoon') which is, with the exception of a couple songs, mostly a solo album, 'Ripely Pine' was produced with a full band. It is both similar and quite different from her first album at the same time. Instructor in English and in Physical Culture for Women. EDWARD BENJAMIN BEATY. RARNEY VALLEY BRANCH EXPERIMENT STATION.
Its only the chorus that repeats the title of the song, a pleasant reminder were still in the same place.Ripely Pine pulls us back magnetically, offering a song for any mood, a howl for any weather. But its on late track The Nothing Part II where Spaltro displays her true potential. Oh no, were singing / lay me down, lay me low, let go your crown, disarm me, she sings softly.
And then it becomes a we, a weighty pause before the chorus erupts behind her, a riot of handclaps and percussion, an anthem, a hymn. They let the Lady give her benediction alone: that we may ripely pine in the mammoth nothing of the night / left to our own devices / and well know, well know, well know just what we want.Plenty of albums mine youthful angst; far fewer offer any answers.
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Spaltro pleads and howls her way to the crux of the matter, finds her own way out, and leaves a poetic map behind for the rest of us. Would that we all pined as ripely.Essential Tracks: Crane Your Neck, Aubergine, and Bird Balloons. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website.
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Aly Spaltro’s stage name and backstory may at first seem awfully whimsical; the name came to her in a dream, and she first started playing and practicing in the basement of the video rental store where she worked near her hometown of Portland, Maine. So far, so Fox Searchlight. But forget fey; that basement gave her license to get loud, and the songs on Ripely Pine are true to their original forms, bolstered with rugged, hefty arrangements largely written by Spaltro. Her bodily, biblical epics call to mind, and the.The lyrics of Ripely Pine are hungry for love and experience and bone-picked honesty. She explains the title as a kind of openhearted longing, though it's gorier than that: “Let’s crawl all over one another like crows on a carcass,” she sings like leading a gospel choir on opener “Hair to the Ferris Wheel”. “Like ants on a crumb starving only for the taste of tongues.” It leaps and pivots through soft woolen strums to freewheeling 1990s alt.rock- that structural skittishness is a constant throughout- and establishes Spaltro’s palpable experience of love as a messy, fetid thing, perhaps more remarkable for the fact that she wrote these songs when she was 18, 19.
“Love is selfish/ Love goes tick-tock-tick/ Love knows Jesus/ Apples and oranges,” she sighs of its many coexisting contradictions.“You with the nape that holds my gaze/ You with the tongue that speaks my name,” she glowers on “Aubergine”, slyly sizing up her intended like prey on a plain. The brooding interlude comes amid truly joyous New Orleans-style carnival blasts, and the song’s broiling-over stream of consciousness approach makes it feel like an incredible street party. The best songs on Ripely Pine are unpredictable in a way that’s refreshing because of their sloppy energy, not in spite of it.
Some of them have been worked on for five years, but they’re executed with unaffected confidence rather than niggled perfection; there are pitchy vocals here and there, and with only three songs under four minutes and almost everything playing out like the closing number of a headline festival set, it’s much too long. While her gentler solo songs are pretty enough, they can also be samey, making the hour length even less necessary. But what Ripely Pine has that much comparable rousing-but-empty country-tinged trad rock doesn’t have is raw, credulous fire.The best songs here are all nearly seven minutes long, but their erratic structures make compelling stages to watch dueling tirades of emotion swarm around one another.
Spaltro wields ferocity and timidity equally well, to the extent that it’s hard to tell which is her more frightening mode.
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