Alessi's Ark The Still Life. Our favorite child prodigy named for an italian blender has returned. She returned some time ago. I am not dutiful in my postings on here. She is now 23. part of the uncomfortable phase for readers when I was discovering brilliantly talented teenagers from around the world, quite accidentally possibly, making a turn as Stuart Murdoch possibly, creeps with poor grammar skills. Soap and Skin now has a baby. Alessi has a new record on Bella Union. Bella Union also released her second album which I did not love nearly as much as the first. This one is much better than the second. First track has a skeletal metronomic feel. Skat style whispers and her odd phrasing still intact, it's indelibly charming. I have this strange hope for her. She'll follow the creative muse and not turn into a music industry cliche, turn more towards Kate Bush(though her talent is not nearly so impressive) and not towards dating John Mayer. The songs are short, the first Tin Smithing is already over. Second track, classic italian blender stylings on the guitar and a shuffling trotting backbeat, wavering on the introduction to the chorus, delightful. How does she determine which notes to bend so flavorfully? Is it this that makes my ecstatic praise seem despicable and uncouth? Some clever tricks on the production on track two. On her second album the songs were all very short and lacked the drama that her teenaged flowering had had, it seemd she had already entered a barren middle section of her career even though the record was marginally attractive. Here she's been turned a bit more idealistic in her musical pursuits. Gone are the Lesley Gore covers and in are some goth window dressing that surround her basic folk leanings in more atmospheric accessories. In track three, The Rain there is hung about the basic structure an overbearing sense of drear. Next track an intermission, a moment of reflection, "I'm told there's good things I've done, when you're me, you remember none". A bit harsh on herself there. She seems as if she was reared among the characters of through the looking glass, in tall dewy meadows flush with sunshine dappled through leaves. And so her karmic introspection seems implausible though insistently lovely. Next track, Big Dipper, more of the cosmic cowboy sound effects with a bit of Spoon and Rafter feel brought into the tracks. She's not nearly so reverent as Neil Halstead though and so there are patches and quilts instead of a tapestry freighted with the history of country rock. Has she heard a Levon Helm drum solo? Probably. I imagine there are loads of people at Bella Union telling her to listen to Big Star records and Graham parsons, eager to abuse another child into an appreciation of the classics. I hate the 1960s, everything about them, mostly, except for the Beach Boys and West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band and the Kinks and Paul Simon. That's it. Next track, a bot of foreboding in the introduction. Is she a convincing goth? Not usually. She's adopting the role of mother in this track. Has she a child? Has one of Bright Eyes planted his flag? Unknown, it is irrelevant to the matter at hand, is she writing from experience now or are this poems and flights of fancy when next she plays live will she play barefoot on top of pianos constructed from coffins that once carried the bones of martyrs from the children's crusade? This one is a bit silly. There isn't much here and the producer is trying to imbue the proceedings with a sinister element that doesn't flow naturally from this warm hearted soul singer. Neil Gaiman-esque doors creaking, large animated eyes peering back from in between the notes, it's all a consistent tempo from start to finish and it doesn't have the whimsical flourishes that we loved on the first record but she's an artist now. A business person intent on making it in the wide world of music piracy and indifferent teens torn between descendants of Clare Grogan and hair products in boat shoes. WHen I was a child I was into Fastway and Vendenberg and Queensryche and Iron Maiden until I discovered the Smiths, until John Hughes led me down that garden path. How easy to discover this english treasure in this age of the instantaneous but are there children begging their parents for a child because Alessi has one in Afraid of Everyone. Introversts seem to be in style these days, the zeitgeist in a whisper. I am introverted. I am not shy. I am unskilled in casual conversation. i was watching a skype interview on the Wall Street Journal website and a kid who probably could buy me ten times over but still has the same haircut I had in 8th grade discussed Dale Carnegie and how he told a story about a bicycle he found in the middle of a lake to the boredom of his important guests and I thought only that he needed new friends. It could be a Flann O'Brien story come to life, the bicycle detective arriving a few minutes later to arrest you for a dash too furious of sarcasm and wit. We can't be witty, we must discuss the weather and then ask about Victorian Crime drama screen plays written for the most important person in Denver, the person that lives up stairs. I love the current track, Sans Balance, she seemed fully formed with a voice on her first record but this also sounds organically grown within the folds an crevices of her neocortex, is she multifaceted and clever as well as charming. it could be. Another great track has just begun. Simon Raymonde needs to book her on Axe Cop stat. She could play Alice after the miscarriage, a smudged innocence smeared across the camera eye, we would all feel so vulnerable and despairing for the youth of the world that seems irrevocably lost. The world seems so very old. Even the brightest hope in the galaxy, our fearless president, is nearly extinguished, hubris having been mistaken for competence and the grinding work of mediocrity that propels all of the universe in view has turned our mental existence to soup. It is in need of more italian blenders, fascist or not, and fewer messiahs. My parents assigned me an unremarkable name, I have lived up to it. Money, a short philosophical treatise in a tin pan style and church bells meet the vaudeville back beat. She was born a drummer you know. A Lucksmithian chorus comes into view, we're all holding up our beers and swaying back and forth reminiscing over when times were so much more magical when Martin Starr had all of the answers. Last track now. More of the mid tempo prettiness, organ on a small plank in the misty landscape behind her fluttering heart songs. She's probably a sweet young woman, ready for the world's mundanity and indifference to beauty to leave her lovely songs to die a pitiable death alone and afraid. If this world was better I'd grow one foot taller. But I am already taller than average, so there is so very little hope and italian blenders will remain on dusty shelves in the archives of dreamers. Update: Oh, apparently Afraid of Everyone is a cover from the band the National. I am unfamiliar with the National and I hope their baby was born happy and that they believe in protecting the public health and endeavor get their child immunized on schedule.