(Paper Bag)

www.paperbagrecords.com

I love Canada.  You should love Canada too.  It's cold there, much colder than wherever you are.  Unless you're reading this from Canada.  Or Scandinavia.  One surmises that in colder climes there's more time to make music as there's no real reason to go outside and stand in the snow. 

Laura Barrett's new long-player Victory Garden is surprising not because it comes from Canada but rather it is imbued with a luminous sunlight bright enough to melt the coldest winter snow.  Even stranger is the fact that the sunlight comes not from guitars, bass, or drums, but from kalimba, the thumb piano native to Africa that is Barrett's stock-and-trade.

Kalimba sets the foundation for the songs on Victory Garden and indeed percussion is key here.  Barrett herself plays piano, xylophone, and glockenspiel.  As if not enough tuned percussion (you'd be surprised), Paul Aucoin joins with vibraphone, grand marimba, and xylophone.  The result of this percussion bed is akin to the minimalist compositions of Terry Riley and, especially, Steve Reich, whose compositions for marimba provide a kind of touchstone for Barrett's work here. Barrett and Aucoin's percussion work is augmented by a variety of horns, reeds, and strings; the resulting album is akin to a stage musical helmed by a whimsical elf.

One wishes that the tunes themselves matched the interesting arrangements, but the songs themselves are not quite so incredible.  Not that they are bad, by any means, for indeed they have a certain sense of whimsy that in most ways match the arrangements.  The arrangements, though, are so good that in some ways they force the listener to wonder what song is actually lurking beneath the layered sounds.  At times, perhaps that song is not quite as impressive as the instrumentation, as on the album's low point, "Rien a Declarer." 

Despite such occasional missteps, Victory Garden is very much worth pondering.  Barrett is on to something here: off-kilter songwriting expertly arranged.

Standout Tracks: "Bluebird," "Escape to the Sun Dome" CHRISTIAN KIEFER