Alessi's Ark Time Travel. She's 20 now. Almost 21. I was twenty once, it was so very long ago. I was in college. I was listening to Ride. I had a conversation about who it was I was in love with at the time and it was Helena Bonham Carter and Emily Lloyd and Clare Grogan, I didn't list any pop stars. It was a throughly male childhood of pop fandom, mine. Later came the Throwing Muses, Lush, Kate Bush, Harriet Wheeler, sigh. Ok, I lie. Of course I hadn't any idea who Clare Grogan was when I was 20, to my utter sadness as an older adult. This is less fairy tale and less whimsical than the first album. It's spare, it's short, it's charming, still. She has an endearingly odd way of turning a musical phrase. As if I would see the words written on the back of a piece of bazooka bubblegum wrapper and just sing it deadpan and straight and Alessi would instead convert it into some strangely affected bit of melodrama. It's charming. I've said that. Already on to song two. An acoustic guitar, a cello or a violin, a trumpeter. Very nice. She's moved to SImon Raymonde's label now. Perhaps they have sent her to camp with some of the other folks on the label, pack up your sleeping bag, your can of corn mash, and your bear repellent. Perhaps she has come here to Colorado with John Grant and he took her to Estes National Park and showed her how to be really very depressed and feeling as if the world finds you worthless and this has helped to inform her music. It is a national tragedy that John Grant has not been recognized as a precious national resource and granted access to all of the most important avenues of power. With a voice like his he should be in charge of national air traffic control, in charge of tarp, in charge of NOAA, instead he's giving interviews where he makes me incredibly sad. Granted, oh pun, his last album was dreadful. Seocnd track The Wire. Alessi does sad but not miserable. Last time I spoke of fascist blenders and parents. This time I will not. But The Wire? Blenders have wires? Third track, a bit Belle and Sebastian actually. I can imagine her as a fan of Belle and Sebastian, perhaps falling in love with The Life Pursuit and working her way back through the catalog until she finally ended up using the money from her royalty check for selling blenders to the Red Brigades in Italy to purchase an original pressing of Tigermilk. I once sent Mario from Shoestrings on a goose chase for Tigermilk because I thought I had seen a vinyl copy in Royal Oak. I hadn't. He was not happy. I've never actually spoken to him. It was a rumor spread by third party. This has that Belle and Sebastian shuffle. Mark from the Lucksmiths once told me that they had the best set of drums ever. I don't know how he came to this conclusion. We were listening in Kansas City. That is the end of my name dropping. Fourth track, more of the shuffle, I think some of the shine that is missing that was on the first album is that a lot of this flows into each other without there being a great deal to differentiate the material either sound wise, content wise or energy wise. Whereas I thrilled to the change of pace each time Gold-Bears segued one of their songs together with another here it takes the focus off of the individual songs and we must judge the record as a whole. I judge it kindly. I enjoy that she looks like a 20 year old still in search of her identity, that her image seems self-constructed and that she doesn't have a stylist or someone to compose her public persona. I would imagine she dresses the same on Sundays at home mowing the lawn as on Thursdays on the road in Tulsa playing some country bar with Milwaukee's Best on tap. Fifth track, less rocking, she never really rawks, this has a slight country twang, she might make a fantastic country record one day, move to Nashville for a month and one half and work with Cortney Tidwell and dress up her country odes and laments with beats and breaks and it'd be terrific. She could play each night on Broadway in Nashville. it would be like camp, except without John Grant. Maybe they sent her camping with the Devics in LA, in Compton, pitching a tent next to the Korean convenience store. Sitting around an oil drum singing Devics songs "here, here, let's just stay here". Awww...is that racist? Unlikely. Sixth song is an instrumental, lovely, I enjoyed the piano especially. Next track is another reserved, acoustic strum, her voice inflected so oddly that it is delightful. Not enough music is about performance these days. It is about that execrable epithet being a songwriter. I bet Alessi wrote all of those songs, well except for this one which is a Lesley Gore cover, endearing, but she doesn't seem to imagine that her songs contain such immeasurable depth that she doesn't need to embellish them with heart and soul. This is an ideal cover. Lesley Gore was the prototypical teenager, Alessi seems cut from the same mold except for her expansive imagination. I think the image of she and John Grant warding off the bears in the park by playing Lesley Gore 45s very loud is cute. There are too many people who take themselves far too seriously. There are too many people who worry about where they are at. Too many people that live by some rigid code of conduct. I live inside of my head, when I exit it is awkward and difficult. The answer is to leave it less often, to write books and have fantastical experiences through the written word and brilliant pop songs and leave real life to the rigid, to the wooden creatures that don't exist in my head. Next track has been playing, a bit more gothic, she's not frightening or haunting and I am not sure she could be, but this has a darker current to it and her voice is more subdued. Is this how the first take comes about or does she write a song and then Alessi-ize it? I wonder. The music is played very competently, I am meant to comment on the music occasionally. I wonder whose grave she would visit if given the chance, whose heart she would keep in the drawer next to her on the desk a la Shelley, whose sliver of brain case she would keep and have others mistake for a dried out leaf. Perhaps Roald Dahl, Connor Oberst, the guy from Mumford & Sons. She probably doesn't much like the John Grant album either, she wishes the Czars were better friends and wonders who Gil Scott Heron is and why all of her band mates are sad over his passing. She mentions Otis Redding in this track. She covered Lesley Gore. Let's hope that Blue is not next on her turntable of discovery. Second to last track, a short one, her guitar, her voice, this is where she shines because stripped bare of all of the fluff it's her and her imagination on display and a heart that beats through her chest. Lovely. So very lovely. if you meet anyone ever who has a disparaging word for Alessi then you should disqualify them from humanity immediately. Last track. The Bird Song, strange multi-tracking, strange noises, strange plucks, bird songs, charming things all in a collage of charm and now a harp, harps are very trendy, and is that a male voice? My ears. As understated as the rest of the album, as wonderful as the rest of her being.