Lady Lazarus Mantic. The name, Sylvia Plath reference, ugh. But it's actually lovely, the record, Sylvia Plath perhaps. Why not be more independent and far ranging and adopt a nom de guerre from a poem by Anna Laetitia Barbauld? You know, the rumor is that she counted Marat among her lovers. And she hung out with Joseph Priestly who was eminently more cool than Ted Hughes. In fact if Sylvia had perhaps chosen her Ted's more wisely she wouldn't have placed the damp dish towels across the threshold and checked the pilot light. If she had me Theodore Hall instead, I believe he arrived at Cambridge before she died, well she might have had a rich and wonderful life. He could have seduced her with tales of watching Kim Philby look at photographs of Giraffes and she could have written a poem for him about treachery and naivety. He was a dashing young physicist/spy. First track was distant voices and piano, surely it was all torment and the rain. The rain has been coming each and every day. It isn't a melancholic arrival, it is angry and tumultuous. This isn't angry, it's monotonic and basic and I rather enjoy it. This second track is much like the first only with less distant voices and more notes on the piano. Is Lady Lazarus to be counted among those who scrape Ted Hughes vile name from Sylvia's tombstone every season? I hope not. Anna Laetitia was a prototypical romantic poet, were she more astute Lady Lazarus could have chosen Cristina Rosetti instead and coloured her record with the flourish of a pre-raphaelite instead of the greys of a luddite. She could cover Shelleyan Orphan. She could have hair filled with curls and Ivo Watts Russell as a close personal confidant. In the 1990s this might have been released on Xpressway records. It's primitivism. More shrill voiced sentiments and inexpertly played piano. The songs are somewhat long, I am not certain I will be able to maintain my literary allusions for the duration. Shelleyan Orphan were mocked for their literary pretensions. Sad. Graeme Downes was also criticized for his pretensions and so he stopped mentioning Dostoevsky and started to sing about blankets over the sky and wars in his head. Now he's old and he croons sad bitter excoriations of straw men and shadows of history. Perhaps also if Sylvia Plath's father had bene the Belgian apiologist Maurice Maeterlinck rather than the dreaded Otto of Daddy well she would have grown up reading The Secret Life of Bees and hallucinated over its strange passages over the courtship of bees and the glory of their devotion and been a happy child and we would never have been concerned about Sylvia Plath. I rather like the Bell Jar and I would like to have read her final notebooks. Am I anxious for 2013? Next track, a bit more pace. It has a Peter Jefferies as neutered by Jean Smith feel to the music. it is all repeating motifs and moans of confession. There is a bit more color in this track provided by a embedded melody and some low rumble in the mix but not a whole lot. With this little variation over the course of the first five tracks she might have considered not having released so many tracks on her album. I am something of a tapophile myself. I enjoy visiting cemeteries. I have two purposes for visiting cemeteries. The first is to sing at the top of my lungs all of the lines to Cemetery Gates and the second...erm, no. I like to go to cemeteries and make lists of names. There are fascinating names carved in stone and I have no compunction over stealing them for my own purposes. Dramatically rendered names are not my strong suit. Better to borrow someone else's inspiration. The second reason I enjoy cemeteries is to look at the headstones and create in my head a life story for these strangers that lie in peace. It is especially easy to conjure romantic tragedies for those that passed far too early. My first ever date was in a cemetery. It was a moonlit picnic against a stream that formed the boundary of a cemetery in Lake Orion, Michigan. I don't revel in the macabre or morose I chose to celebrate life even if it is in the past. A brighter track here, thundering chords on the piano, her voice recorded in a public restroom alongside the interstate. It is called Half-Life. How many tracks have there been that have been called half-life? i would wager there have been a great many. This is a fine addition to the canon. It would be lovely if each regularly repeated song title and sentiment had a canon to compare current offerings to all that has come before. This could be the purpose of the cloud. I don't fell great excitement about the cloud. Already our wireless connectivity is depressed, the idea of 1 million teenagers listening to Bieber on their Android phones rather than their ipods and this causing me headaches at work when trying to transfer photographs of trees on houses and trucks mangled on overpasses is not an appealing imagining. Another similar track. The piano is repetitive, hr voice is not really decipherable, so if she is deep and expressing keenness in spades we are hopelessly unaware. Is this Peter Jefferies piano that she is playing? Did she smuggle her way onto an Otago bound freighter, steal her way onshore, catch a ride to Gwen Jefferies home and steal Peter Jefferies' beloved keyboard? Is his keyboard now in B.C.? Is he still married to Jean Smith? Does she still wear her bearskin cap? Next track, no piano. Twinkles or trickles on a teapot. It's uninspired and dreary. I am enjoying it. "Just do something girl, was my reply, just do something girl, don't worry about anything". Hmmm...was this the advice given to her before she absconded with Peter Jefferies' prize? Perhaps. I should write about The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World some day, "just do something"-right? Good advice. I don't like The Last Great Challenge... as much as I love Messages from the Cakekitchen. Peter has less tenderness in his croon. it is more scientific. He could have had a brilliant career as an Earth Sciences teacher. Midnight Music Condition for a Broken Heart, I like that title, it seems more plaintive and urgent. Still rudimentary attempts at the piano but her voice seems more pleasingly engaged. I can't make out the words, not clearly, but with a clever title such as this surely the words form the basis of a splendid dream. Did it cost 11 dollars to record this album? I don't know where lady Lazarus is from. i would imagine she is american, who else to be so obvious to select a Sylvia Plath poem to label confessional music. Next track, less good title, I Couldn't Find Me in Anything. Less good music. Less good voice. I was unaware that I had downloaded this. I've had it for months. I will delete it as soon as I am finished typing. "This isn't writing, it's typing" but I am not in Lakewood and I am not Jack Kerouac and you are not Truman Capote. I am anxious to write about Heart Strings instead. They are not ponderous and important, they are charming and endearing and I more closely resemble the latter. I can be serious. I know a lot of things but how to come off as something not monstrously pedantic? I don't Know. I just nod and smile when the founding fathers are labeled terrorists. What of George Mason? What of James Madison? I was in no condition to found a nation when I was 25. 35. 38. But there was kissing. And I haven't been kissed in some time. Next track, ugh, she's showing off on the piano, oh dear. It's a struggle. She should take lessons. Perhaps it is Isidore Isou that has stepped in on the piano. he's wearing a 4 foot collar and top hat and can't see the keys from the bees. maurice maeterlink has his head in his antennae. This is perhaps the worst instrumental that I have ever heard. Perhaps. That is unkind. I had a friend that used to love Cat Power because she was absolutely certain that she could play guitar better than Cat Power and this gave her a feeling of superiority over Cat Power. My friend would love Lady Lazarus. now there are buzzes and her dreary voice, oh this is tedious. i have a few more tracks to endure. I will maintain. This is a short one, Pearl, only 2 minutes long. SOunded like the painful birth of a pronoun. Another track, same as the rest, only longer. I will need a glass of milk in order to finish this. This is work, and I might just need an exhortation the likes of which Marcus Aurelius delivered in Dalmatia, "You have no real love for yourself; if you did you would love your nature,and your nature's will. Craftsmen who love their trade will spend themselves to the utmost in laboring at it, even going unwashed and unfed; but you hold your nature in less regard than the engraver does his engraving, the dancer his dancing, the miser his heap of silver, or the vainglorious man his moment of glory. " Remember that the next time someone says to Levene "you call yourself a salesman you song of a bitch?". There is elegance. I mentioned kissing. It was dreadful kissing because I am apparently now a dreadful kisser. My muscles have lost their fine movement. My face is alien to the rest of my being. Listening to the bloodless is in no way going to improve my methods of seduction. But it is the last song, soon I will be able to turn the page and listen to the Sixths Kissing Things and allow Sarah Cracknell to reignite my passion. No.