White Hinterland - Metronome

Casey Dienel's Wind-Up Canary was one of those albums that felt tragic to me.  At that time, I worked in a lab, investigating tiny coral polyps under a microscope, singing along to Dr. Monroe while palm trees rustled in the breeze outside my window.  I was captured by Dienel's vocal style and bare-bones instrumentation, but was afraid that the very lo-fi production I enjoyed was a signal that it would be the last we would ever hear from Dienel.  

Not so.  Looks like, while Dienel won't be releasing her sophomore effort Vessels any time soon, she is here as one half of White Hinterland.  Joining Shawn Creeden to release Phylactery Factory  in 2008, White Hinterland was clearly born in the aftermath of whatever Dienel envisioned for herself on her lonesome.  By 2010's Kairos, though, they'd thrown out the piano and embraced slower tempos.  Gone too was the jazz, and, in my opinion, the magic.

Now, four years since White Hinterland's last release, we have Baby.  It starts off with a bit of a back-to-basics track, Wait Until Dark.  Here, Dienel's got that piano back, and the chord progression (3:25-3:45) to boot, but there's reservation in both her lyrics and expression that we didn't see earlier in her career.

I'm a bigger fan of this than I was of Kairos.  Perhaps in an effort to be timely, the latter almost totally abandoned Dienel's vocal charms.  The problem with that is that 2010 was not a fantastic year for indie female vocals, at least when it comes to my taste.

This is an album to listen to in order.  It doesn't immediately strike me as a best album of 2014, but the band is certainly making some wise choices.  I like to see a vocalist challenging herself.  "Is this my weakness?" she belts a capella at the end of Baby.  Ironically, because she limited her range in Wind up Canary, I would have answered in 2005, of course not, it was her voice that made her special!  Now, Dienel has attempted to be more than quirky or dreamy:

She's working on her craft.  This, of course, makes her more vulnerable than ever.  God bless her.