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Eleni Mandell might not be the best singer in the
world, at least by American Idol criteria, but she’s got a voice to die for. More
precisely, she has two killer voices: the singing kind and the writing
kind. Both are exquisitely expressive, instantly recognizable, and so
perfectly symbiotic that describing one necessitates describing the other.
If her range is somewhat limited, her pitch at times uncertain, so be it;
like Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and so many other great singer/songwriters,
she doesn’t disguise her flaws so much as exploit them. The
imperfections only underscore her vulnerability, the fact that she’s
a human being, not some Pro Tool-ed android. Her genius is recombinant,
unstable, an unlikely fusion of apparent anomalies: Imagine the love child
of Patsy Cline and Tom Waits, or maybe Julie London and Raymond Chandler.
Mandell, a model of restraint, would never resort to such extravagant
metaphor-mongering, but, then again, she doesn’t have to. She just
opens her mouth, and little miracles slip out. Miracle of Five,
Mandell’s sixth album, picks up where her previous one, 2004’s Afternoon, left off. Both
records are oddly atavistic, evoking a sepia-tinted past that’s one
part memory and two parts myth, but, as great as Afternoon was, Miracle is better. All traces of
hipsterist shtick have vanished. Where she once indulged in schizoid genre
exercises — here a punked-up Wanda Jackson, there a postmodern Peggy
Lee — she now shepherds her influences into one seamless style
that’s uniquely her own. Although her songs still draw on bygone
traditions, particularly cabaret, classic country, and the Great American
Songbook, Miracle is
no retro hodgepodge, careering from one old-timey form to the next.
Instead, it’s an album that’s both of its time and beyond it. Moreover, Miracle just plain sounds better than her previous albums. Producer
Andy Kaulkin makes the most of her drowsy contralto, keeping the
accompaniment spare so that she doesn’t have to strain to be heard.
Mandell is a crooner, not a belter, and she thrives in intimate settings.
To be sure, there are many different instruments in the mix —
including saxophone, clarinet, Dobro, banjo, harp, and viola — but Kaulkin layers them
judiciously, punctuating her voice instead of competing with it. The
supporting musicians are all first rate, especially longtime drummer Kevin
Fitzgerald and his former Geraldine Fibbers colleague Nels Cline (more
recently of Wilco) on electric guitar, lap steel, and assorted noises. The
great D.J. Bonebrake (X drummer/linchpin) puts in a memorable appearance on
vibes, and Kaulkin, a versatile keyboardist, supplies honky-tonk piano,
churchy organ, and dreamy celeste. What really distinguishes the album, though, is the
sheer craftsmanship of the songs. Mandell has a gift for uncovering the
mystery beneath the simplest melody, the most prosaic phrase. The theme of
the album is love, the oldest subject imaginable, yet she manages to find
new ways to limn its endless permutations. There’s the sweetly
boastful narrator of “Girls,” who tries to win over her
Casanova boyfriend with a pitch that’s as hopeful as it is
heartbreaking: “I am a marble the color of candy/I’ll make you
money whenever you’re gambling/I am the dice you roll in the alley/I
am the pennies that come in handy.” There’s the bleakly
hilarious heroine of “My Twin,” who imagines four possible
outcomes for her future soulmate, all disastrous (his train derails, his
plane crashes, his ship sinks, a fire devours him). There’s the
desperate adulteress of “Somebody Else,” the magical-thinking
ingenue of “Miracle of Five,” the cautiously optimistic,
possibly delusional party girl of “Make-Out King.” Love,
Mandell suggests, is a many-splendored thing, but it’s also full of
splinters.
Contact René
Spencer Saller at rssaller@core.com.
This article appears in Feb 8-14, 2007.
