Lost In The Trees: Ari Picker, Drew Anagnost, Mark Daumen, Leah Gibson, Emma Nadeau and Jenavieve Varga.D.L. Anderson
ROOTS / POP
- All Alone in an Empty House
- Lost in the Trees
- Anti-Records
Pop's crush on classical music continues apace with this eccentric debut album from Lost in the Trees, a collective from North Carolina who, in their own words, "have discovered a new genre called orchestral folk pop." Apparently this genre was hidden somewhere between Vivaldi's conservatory in Venice and a front porch in Appalachia.
Listening to the album is a bit like being Alice in Wonderland. Just when you begin to think you know where you are, everything goes strange.
The title track opens the disc with a loping acoustic guitar riff, and what sounds like the creak of a rocking chair. The music soon moves off the porch into the studio, as Ari Picker (the leader of the band and writer of all its music) loads on strings and chorus for increasingly contrapuntal verses.
Picker began in popular music, studied film scoring at Berklee, and there also developed a fascination with classical. The title track is both his manifesto and his stylistic autobiography, moving from rustic folk to classically tinged arrangements across an expanding sound stage. After the second listen, the creaking chair sounds like a Foley effect.
Picker's classical yearning bursts into full bloom in Mvt I Sketch, the first of two valentines to his dead white heroes. The main idol here is Vivaldi, though the chugging string rhythms reminiscent of Vivaldi's concerti run abruptly into a cello solo written in much more Romantic style. Mvt II Sketch rummages further through the 19th-century style book, then lurches into a spiky form of modernist pattern music. In between these earnest student essays, Picker sings a humble little tune called Love On My Side, which might have been pulled from an old dust-bowl almanac.
Walk Around the Lake opens with a walloping choral salute that wouldn't seem out of place in Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. Such moves reach as far as Radiohead's Renaissance-style break in the middle of Paranoid Android, but that bit of classical appropriation works for me, while Picker's doesn't. His pastiches (to borrow a phrase from Cyril Connolly) are laid at the feet of his beloved like a puppy's slobbery ball. (I would say the same of Rufus Wainwright's opera Prima Donna.) Sincerity is a virtue, but it's also an essential ingredient of kitsch. Too bad; when he's not trying so hard, Picker can write a good song.