MUSIC REVIEW: ROBIN BACIOR

A Singsong Delivery of Jazzy Folk Rock with Nostalgia for the End of Another Year

By: Andrew Livingston

October 31, 2011

(Consonants & Vowels Recordings) Summer is decidedly behind us now, and if you’re wondering where it went, you’re not the only one -- so does California-born and New York-based singer-songwriter Robin Bacior on her debut album, Rest Our Wings. From the opening song, “Pair Migration,” to the last song, “Before the New Year,” Rest Our Wings is preoccupied with nostalgia for a recent past that went by too quickly to comprehend.  The album’s lo-fi production and acoustic folk/jazz arrangements lend it a hazy, late-summer feel.

In Bacior’s world, humans are swept through life with as much free will as birds flying south for the winter -- a recurring image on Rest Our Wings. The opening line of “Pair Migration” is, "Lately I feel in flight, backward." The song is a headlong tumble through New York with a chronology as twisted as Memento’s. She sings, "We can bend our timeline in a bow / from my hair to fancier clothes / or surprise it like a party / full of people we don't know lit up by liquor's glow / When we're restless we will go." She mentions clocks crawling off walls and friends who go with the flow, assuming they’ll end up somewhere, all over a looped, rising piano arpeggio that drives the song relentlessly forward.

In “Ohio,” the birds come back to give us an album title in the line, “To the third floor to rest our wings.” But the song is anything but restful. The drums pop and clatter like a pounding surf while a cello flutters and careens over the squall. Robin’s vocal, telling the story of an old flame or a new one — it's never quite clear — has to dance quickly through the spaces between cymbal crashes. Then all the noise abruptly ceases. But instead of relaxing the tension, Robin ramps it up with the line, "There are times / I get uneasy in the lamplight," sung quietly over a taught, wintery acoustic guitar riff.

Bacior spends most of the album on guitar. Her strumming and fingerpicking intertwine with Dan Bindschedler’s cello and acoustic bass to give the album a folksy feel, while Nick Smeraski’s brushed drumming ranges from spare punctuation on “Housewife’s Lament,” to subtle color and texture on “Pair Migration,” to jazz chaos on “Ohio.” The three play off each other so well, the album feels like a jazz trio recorded it, so it’s no surprise Smeraski and Bindschedler share production credits with Bacior. There is plenty of musicianship on display from the three, but no showing off: the arrangements always serve the songs.

An aspect of the album that might be overlooked but shouldn’t be is Robin’s keen sense of bathos. It’s evident not only in her lyrics but in the way she sings them. On "Ballad From a Liar," she sings, "There's a truth / in the back of my head / I reach for it / It goes to bed," in a maudlin croon worthy of Morrissey.  "I Hate the States" is, lyrically, a fairly earnest depiction of the pain of loving someone who lives far away. But then it's called "I Hate the States." And Robin sings that phrase with so much reckless gusto in the chorus, she almost tips the song over the edge of burlesque.

But she doesn’t. She always manages to make funny lines a little poignant, and sad lines a little self-mocking. There’s no better example than the final song, “Before the New Year,” which ends with Bacior reflecting on the the previous year, vowing to learn from the mistakes of the past before admitting she really doesn’t have the time: “Well, I’ll fix it if I can / but…theses empty hands / Oh, these hungry days.”

Her singsong delivery betrays the fact that she doesn’t really mind. Life is a mad rush sometimes, but if an album like Rest Our Wings is any kind of evidence, that’s often when it’s at its most exultant.

For Fans of: Joni Mitchell, Jolie Holland, Morrissey

Standout Tracks: "Pair Migration," "Ohio," "Ballad from a Liar," "I Hate the States," "Before the New Year"