Abra Moore: Sing
You will appreciate this album best, I think, if you are patient with it.
The shuffling drums and simmering accordion on "Sweet
Chariot", the opening track, seem, if this is the sort of thing
you are anticipating, to be ever just another two or three beats from exploding
into something vigorous and anthemically cathartic, and the song is in this
way something of a microcosm of the whole record. But I'll go ahead and
eliminate the suspense: it never happens. There is dancing here, and jubilation
of a sort, but it is the kind of dancing that people do alone, slowly, in
front of snowy windows, in soft clothes and thick socks, in commercials
for instant hot chocolate and comfortingly flavored teas, and the kind of
jubilation that makes you smile inwardly and, at most, bounce just slightly,
not howl and leap upon your teammates. This is not a bad thing, at all,
but it may require you to adjust your expectations. Which is good practice,
anyway, of course.
Fittingly for a record that is best appreciated patiently, Sing appears
to have been made patiently, too. Abra's languid voice has the faerie delicacy
of a porcelain Edie Brickell replica, with some of Edie's tendency to slide
into notes, but without quite as many of her mannered poetry-reading cadences.
Her auto-harmonies are elegant, but restrained. There is something angelic
about her, something between the unearthly rapture of Jane Siberry, who
I continue to suspect really is an angel, and the deceptive frailty
of Juliana Hatfield, who merely played one. Her phrases end on almost subliminal
baroque flourishes, like Victorian signature adornments done with a pen
almost too fine to transfer any ink to the surface, so that when you look
at them directly it's hard to distinguish them from the grain of the paper,
but as you turn away they glint ever so fleetingly in the periphery of your
gaze. Traces of her breathing give her vocal tracks some extra immediacy,
without obtrusive compression turning the breathing into something aggressive
and animate, as it does with Sinead O'Connor and Tori Amos.
Spare guitar parts from her and producer Mitch Watkins provide the frames
for most of these songs, with Abra adding some piano and accordion, Mitch
adding keyboard ambience, and various fleeting guests providing muted drums
and an assortment of extraneous acoustic instruments. There is some Poi
Dog Pondering connection in Abra's past; my working assumption is that she
was once a member, but that's just a guess. Whatever it is, PDP leader Frank
Orrall contributes one song ("Step Without Looking"), and "Ku'u
Ome O Kahalu" alludes to the band's Hawaiian origins. Despite this
and Abra's Austin residence, however, anything remotely regional or ethnic
here has totally escaped my notice. These songs sound to me only like themselves.
They inhabit some abandoned interstices between folk and rock, between pop
sirens and Ry Cooter soundtrack diffidence, between Shawn Colvin and the
Penguin Cafe Orchestra - middle countries whose inhabitants have long ago
forgotten that theirs is not really a place, and in this forgetting have
made it one. It is music I can't imagine ever being commercialized. You
can't dance to it, but it's too individual to be much good for office filler,
and not only will nobody play it on the radio, but you probably won't be
able to get any of your friends to sit still long enough to understand why
it's wonderful, either, and if they try to talk over it you'll get irritated.
It is, then, an album you will simply have to buy for yourself,and listen
to when you're alone. A neglected genre, and perhaps a neglected facet of
your life, as well.
Neither of which should be. 
Bo Beat 
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