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Bartholomew begins by playing a steady and airy clawhammer banjo melody, an instrument that she learned specifically for this project, and then adds mandolin, acoustic guitar and upright bass as she exposes the hypocrisy of her subject's clientele and the secrets she will not keep. 'Mountain Dove Song' sketches a character who refuses to be silent about this, at turns, dark and largely untold chapter of the Last Frontier state. With them came women who sought a better life, but whose options were often limited to sex work Juneau-based songwriter Annie Bartholomew tells their stories throughout her debut album Sisters of White Chapel. When the gold rush was on in the Yukon at the close of the 19th century, tens of thousands of prospectors flooded into Alaska and Canada to seek their fortunes.

'The Anxiety of Symmetry II' is less barbaric, yet is still an engaging exploration of what is arguably the universal instrument of our species: the human voice. Twenty-five years ago, Orcutt co-created a similar, albeit more blunt study in electronics and the human voice with Harry Pussy's Let's Build a Pussy, which featured four sides of a sampled scream bellowed out by drummer/vocalist Adris Hoyos. Akin to 20th-century composer Morton Feldman's vocal-based works, the 16-minute track demands more from the listener than mere ambient music, yet somehow soothes with its robotic, canonical rounds - a mashup of esoteric mathematic-based compositions and OCD. On 'The Anxiety of Symmetry II,' female voice samples sing the number of the corresponding notes of the first six tones of the major scale.

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Like previous 'counting albums,' including one featuring Joey Ramone's instantly recognizable count-off, Orcutt returns to his open-sourced Cracked software to craft something mesmerizing. But adherents hoping for any of Orcutt's steel-string immolations might need to swing at a curveball with The Anxiety of Symmetry. To quote another heady kid who loves aerial metaphors, if flying on the ground is wrong, Valazza's gonna make it right.įrom the Miami noise trio Harry Pussy to solo and quartet music, Bill Orcutt has spent decades fire-bombing conventional acceptance of what we consider to be guitar-based music. The magnificent swirl of sound and lyrical poeticism that Valazza and cosmic Americana band TK & the Holy Know-Nothings build around this glimpse of a guy looking skyward turns the song transcendent.

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In the song, Valazza's Michael is, like Mitchell's, a free spirit - but he's been grounded by a broken foot, a mundane calamity that inspires a reverie about accepting limits and maintaining perspective. 'Watching Planes' invokes Mitchell's 'Michael From Mountains' with a main character who's longing for vistas beyond his window. Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing sees the Arizona-born artist trading in her twang, equivocally, for a hazy psychedelia highly evocative of late-1960s English folk music and its Laurel Canyon counterparts, especially early Joni Mitchell. Portland, Ore.-based singer-songwriter Kassi Valazza captures a fluctuating melancholy perfectly on 'Watching Planes Go By,' a standout track from her enrapturing second album, out now on the West Coast's finest little label, Fluff & Gravy. A plane-spotting song can turn joyful, but more often it lingers in that all-too-human space of tenuous hope: not quite letting go of someone leaving, almost managing to take a next step yourself.

Props to 'Leaving on a Jet Plane' for elevating heartache and 'Eight Miles High' for reaching peak altitude, but I'll always prefer a heart-worn tune and some lyrics about dreaming, wishing and never quite getting off the ground. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.I love songs about plane-spotting more than better-known hits about actually being in the air.

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