Alessi's Ark Notes From the Treehouse. Chris Hansen could write this review. i remember before Chris Hansen was hanging out with the pervs he was spending his days as Bill Bonds' boy. One could sense the man love chemistry between the two of them when Bill Bonds sat in his recliner on Channel 7 Action News with his cigarette smouldering off camera and Diana Lewis glaring at him and young Chris, he was young, impressively bouffanted and would report with his pseudo-intensity the citywide panic over the the reported sightings of Ligers somewhere near Freedom Hill just after the mighty Strut had rocked the house. Chris Hansen is big stuff now. Alessi is a young girl. 17 or 18 or 19. I forget. This is a very nice record. It pegs me in the Borders Book music section demographic for certain. I don't mind. I am not cool. I am not Graham Coxon. I sit around the meeting table at work and look at the people around me and I am not cool but they don't know Graham Coxon anyhow. They aren't either but then at least I am not deluding myself. Second song, the first single. Sounds as if she's singing 'the whores' but no she's passionately baying 'the horse'. Does Chris Hansen need to make a call on your party line? Possibly. Some emo luminary is singing now. Alessi probably knows who he is, I don't. I don't live in Nebraska. Someone from around the meeting table is from Nebraska, a part of her life was spent in Crete. She didn't meet any skinny Minoans. First two songs are very short. I have been listening to this album in shipping containers while doing inventory of Christmas Lights in the heat. When the temperature goes above 75 degrees in March it feels depressive. The spring air has had all of its vitality pressed out by the big blocks of high pressure that insure sunny and mild and soulless as far as the eye can see. Possibly there may be snow on Monday, I am praying for feet. It may be millimeters. "I'm English so bear with me, I love you". That's sweet. This is the second single. It is in the coffeehouse damp squib pop mold of girls like Corinne Bailey Rae, Sara Bareilles, Colby Caillet. Sadly those are probably, all, their real names. Well not sadly for Sarah. I have known only a few Saras. My friend's best friend was a Sara, her bosses daughter is a Sarah, or perhaps she is a Sara, it is the same Sara nayhow. I knew a Sarah nursing student but I was in love with her best friend Debbie, owner of the bluest eyes south of the arctic circle and a chubby rear end. There is some suspicious sophistication in the arrangements here that do not probably belong to Alessi. Alessi was named by her parents after a company that manufactures upmarket Italian blenders. The company threatened to sue. They added Ark. There it is, the fruit of my research about this record. The usual pitch is that the more impressive your name surely the less impressive the person? Is Evelyn Waugh an impressive name for a young man? Perhaps Evelyn was smartly monikered in his day, I've thought that his son had the snappier name with his Auberon and yet he wasn't nearly as gifted. Alessi is not an impressive name, it is somewhat ridiculous to name your daughter after a blender, but I like it. I've been watching old interviews with Kate Bush recently. Kate must be maternal grandmother to all of these young girls. None share her abilities or her wit or her humour but she can't control who attempts to imitate her can she. This doesn't sound anything at all like Kate Bush. But it is meant to be kooky, earthy, mystical, look at the sugar horses in the videos. Horses in dreams are alleged to signify positive self-idnetity which is about right here in the age of self-esteem. When I spend my Saturday afternoons watching the combover interview Kate Bush she seems, already, an adult and she's just then only just out of her teens. Compare her to stars today in their late 20s/early 30s who are still more child than functioning adult. Maybe I am just reflecting in the love that I have for Kate Bush i her 20s but then being an idle teen wasn't quite the occupation that it is now what with managing 500 facebook friends, texts, cellular conversations, unearned accolades and praise, it is good that there is not a limit to the number of words that are possible to be spent in the pursuit of vacuousness or we might be in serious trouble. But Alessi doesn't seem vacuous.
She's absolutely charming. Fourth song. Almost all of the songs are very short. Her idiosyncratic delivery might become worn out and frayed after more than a few minutes. It's up, down, turned sideways and corkscrewed countless times within the course of a song. It's endearing. It's why we make claims about her charms. Will Alessi save the world this weekend by turning off the lights? Edward Norton has commanded we do as such and his will is supreme. I will unplug my soul. I wonder about the Alessi company's relationship with Mussolini during the fascist days of Italy when King Victor phoned Benito, ill advisedly. Were there Alessi espresso machines on the front lines fueling the impotent rage of the paper Italian war machine as it ripped through the neolithic armies of the Great Rift Valley? Possibly. Or when Adolf and Tojo visited Rome on holiday were they served smoothies blended by the finest in Italian cookery? Possibly. Of course on Earth Hour, that day of greatest human sacrifice, Alessi's all over the world will be silenced and the world will then have been changed by the sacrifice of having forsaken that last cup of cappuccino. Hallelujah! Alessi's Ark could play an acoustic show and save the world dozens of times ovr. This song is Constellations, acoustic guitars and strings and her kooky voice. Delightful. Really. The producer is meant to be someone impressive. I have no idea if his references are solid. I've been doing job interviews at my work this week and while it is true that unemployment is up we've only reached the level of the barely employable now. When unemployment was at 4% the ranks of the jobless were comprised of the unemployable. Only a slight upgrade has been perceptible in the human cargo that is passing through our office these days. Does Alessi make cigarette machines. Fine Italian cigarette machines. Alessi's Ark sings of smoking. I metnioned that I have been watching Kate Bush videos and in one set of comments someone has a long diatribe against Kate Bush smoking in one of her videos. Ridiculous. But then later I read about a fancy new dispenser that will decide if delinquents are old enough to purchase smokes by measuring the folds of fat around their eyeballs. The younger you are the more eye fat you possess, it is rather accurate, so alleges the manufacturer. Will there be a spate of cosmetic surgeries to enhance the eye fat of sad eyed ladies in their late 30s and 40s when these machines become sentient beings and take over the world one day and decide to sell cigarettes only to the fatty eye fat youth. Next song, Asteroids, it's adventurous. Not "more" adventurous. Being an innocent myself I wonder if I am attracted to this sort of thing because of its wide eyed wholesomeness, smoking aside, and it's escapist surrealism. Clearly Alessi populated her own little existence with sprites and automatic writing and walks through a dew glistened meadow under an amethyst moon. We could be friends, I could write her emails where I would discuss the tragedy of Lucrezia Borgia and her imperiled legacy among the great unwashed. She would write a song about george Clooney, I'd tell her it wasn't very good. And when videos started to appear of young barretted Austrians covering her songs on piano and ukulele I'll stick a pin into her head to make it go pop. It will be marvelous. I rather like this next one. Memory Box, semi-"Be My Baby" drums, frosted vocals and then there are multi-tracked vocals and lovely little lalalas. The last viewmaster reels rolled off of the assembly line recently. We never had a viewmaster, when I was a kid. Aside from Lego and Star Wars figures we didn't have a lot of the "classic" toys. All of our toys were hand me downs from our oldest brother who was much older than the rest of us. Friends had viewmasters and Snoopy Snow Cone machines and Mousetrap!. We made our own version of Hoth. A band saw, some styrofoam and colored electrical tape. It was impressive. Coraline resembled how a movie shot though a viewmaster would have looked. I think. I've never shot a movie through a viewmaster. I remember when I was in fourth grade I had an authentic genius friend named Jeffrey who borrowed my Star Wars figures to make a movie. I was spending my time having the Star Wars figures invade the Lego towns that we had purchased with money from the garage sales spent selling used Kiss posters and here he was filming epic portrayals of the trials of the human spirit using those same figurines. He was an odd boy. He spent all of his time with adults. I've searched for him on the internet and can't find a trace. I'd always imagined he'd have cured cancer by now but perhaps he's in his parent's basement still, trying to finish the movie that he had started in 4th grade. The unknown secret was that I actually scored higher on the Roeper examination than he did. I only test well, he was brilliant, I failed on most other measures of humanity. Alessi probably spends all of her time with adults. She's probably dating someone from the Kaiser Chiefs and as such she's having her spirit slowly ground into the same generic putty as everyone else and so her next album will surely be sad and pitiably mature when it should have been filled with the verve and excitement of youth. Adults! The Dog, can't quite make out the words, not a bad thing. She's young, she left school to become a musician. She's probably only just moved on from Harry Potter to the Twilight series. Soon she'll be reading Flannery O'Connor and adopting the grotesques for her own twisted visions of modernity and it will be lovely and marvelous. On the third album after having broken off her engagement to a Kaiser Chief. And she'll make three million dollars selling her songs for Cuisinart. Being in proximity to Bright Eyes does not seem to have had an adverse affect on her. Bravo. Last song, apparently this is the first song she had ever written, for school, for GCSE's. It's rather good. It has some smart playing on it and she was clever enough to go to the rock and roll cliche book when she needed it. "Oh baaaabeee", so Sonic Boom. There have been recent videos of Sonic Boom playing live and he's still playing while sitting down with his cool floppy fringe(I used to have the same) and his 20 minute versions of Suicide. I saw Sonic Boom play at Coney Island long ago, he taped down the key on his keyboard and I thought it was a dream. He seems moored in time, unaging, not timeless but time stuck. The best version of Suicide I ever saw was actually not from Sonic but rather by the Ropers. The Ropers opened for Bailter Space. Alastair Parker was standing next to me. The Ropers are/were horrible but they did a magnificent version of Suicide, strangely enough, and they do have Revolver too so it isn't at all a done deal that they will all end up in hell only probable. Song is almost over, it is the long epic-y ballad with guitar solos and a sorta Mojave 3 thing happening now. Big echoing voices, some sort of almost cacophony comforted with an injection of strings and loveliness. Well done.