Dark corners and spatial abysses haunt and taunt the curious.
Nothingness questions existence and philosophically torments those willing to address the disparity and similarity between the two.
Simplicity is best employed when conveying these: the most complex of these notions and emotions, like a barely colored canvas that intensely tells only the story it intends. Jesy Fortino makes the noises that tinged canvas cannot.
“Life on Earth” is all eerie echoes, naked acoustic guitar and the vulnerable, otherworldly voice of Seattle’s Fortino, the waif who records and performs as Tiny Vipers.
It’s Fortino’s second long player released on Sub Pop, tailing her 2007 debut on the label and first-ever full-length “Hands Across the Void,” and the two years of progression show. With slightly more production, there’s a cleaner vibe to “Life On Earth,” that doesn’t render the record sterile.
Fortino calls up Cat Power from Chan Marshall’s “Myra Lee” period, a voice certain of nothing but the syllables it carefully spews, with a shaky, bare guitar.
“Life on Earth” is the play between light and dark, with its every sonic element being both. The light guitar plucks balance the dissonant, dark buzz, just as Fortino sings sweet and her blurring echoes remain.
“Eyes Like Ours” opens slowly. “Do you recall when the world was still young? Just a small town,” Fortino asks. She channels ageless spirits in her delivery, without show or silliness, her voice bowing from lovely alto to deep and brutish, dulcet to savory.
“Dreamer” unearths some of Fortino’s most polar, striking lyrics: “I’m going to die. I’m dying for a way out.”
There’s a thematic breath throughout the record, each track taking its time to hypnotically inhale and exhale, the shortest just over four minutes in length, and giving lyrics and strums their due.
With length comes some of Fortino’s best: The title track stretches over ten largely instrumental minutes and finds the medium swaying peacefully with a world of uncertainty.
Here her voice is reminiscent of Joanna Newsom’s regal note bending and she sings, “I’ve been first and last, living slow and living fast.
Always trying to get the best of it all. But there’s more to life than getting. There’s more to the beginning.”
This pure and primal gothic viewpoint is not often explored in popular culture, but Fortino drudges through. What could come off as jaded or manufactured is, instead, childlike and infinitely, wisely wondering.
Recommended If You Dig: Joanna Newsom, Karen Dalton, Cat Power
Reach the reporter at rebecca.bartkowski@asu.edu
