Caught in the Carousel

Ilya

Carving Heads on Cherry Stones
Independent

Ilya

I remain, at 44, happier than ever that I never outgrew my need for music to be transcendent. I'm quite confident that there will always be in me a willingness to supplicate myself to any bit of music that enters the bloodstream like religion.

In 2004, UK band Ilya released its astonishing debut album They Died For Beauty, a sprawling canvas of Morricone, Portishead, Ferry, Bowie and Piaf. On the heels of that album they had the great good fortune of having their song "Bellissimo" picked up by Revlon to be used for its international ad campaign. That song was arresting and sensuous and made commercials better than the shows they were supporting. In 2006, Ilya returned with an even stronger album, Somerset. The Morricone soundscape was largely gone, the songs moving inside, into the darker and moodier landscape of the heart at night.

Now, three years later comes the haunting, yet ultimately baffling Carving Heads On Cherry Stones. What has always made Ilya a stand-up-and-take-notice duo has been the voice of Joanna Swan, quite frankly the single greatest voice ever heard outside of Edith Piaf. The range is dynamically emotional: she can go operatic a la Maria Callas, can gruff a la Amy Winehouse, can glide a la Ella Fitzgerald, can emote a la Shirley Horn and she can inflect a la Dusty Springfield. To put any of Swan's vocals on earphones is to understand the sublime agony of what saints claim to hear. Often, as with 2006's song "Airborne," the vocal can match up a lyric with utterly seductive success: "Like chocolate seeping through my veins." That combination of vocal prowess and lyrical mystery is a recipe that shouldn't have been messed with. But Ilya is not a duo content to continue mining the same ground. And so this time around, Swan experiments with singing most of the songs in a made-up language. For me it seems a tad arrogant, like the indisputable high school beauty wearing headgear to school when the orthodontist told her she only needs to wear a retainer at night. But then again, I am not one to know how tiresome one's own beauty can be; how it can be an albatross. I only know that to accord it anything less than it deserves seems selfish to those on the other side of it. And in terms of the overall merits of this album, it is a curious move.

This doesn't mean the album is a bust; far from it. Songs like "Prairie Dogs," "Haunting," and "Soto," are elegant gems whose sparkles are buried deep in the stone. There are also tracks like "The Color Coral" where the song detours midway through from a Joni Mitchell flower offered from a "talented" but broke 14 year-old to her grandmother at Christmas, before morphing into a nightmare last seen/heard in Kate Bush's 1982 "The Dreaming." As Swan's voice attempts to resolve the competing sides of the same song, the voice is so thinly muscular that the contradiction hurts the teeth and makes the heart unstable. But the dissolve of the lyric into mishmash as the song moves on prevents me from running into the streets, iPod in hand, accosting strangers, putting the headphones around their ears, holding their frames steady as they listen to the only religion one might ever need. (Yes, this may save me in terms of attorney fees, but I want those too few musical geniuses to threaten my decorum). I'd spent a lot of time with an advance copy of this album this summer in Haiti and I found that its darker moments had a kindred home there in those Voodoo nights. Frightening and dark places one sometimes feels compelled to dash toward instead of away from.

But there are also tracks like "Geranium" and "Collide" which seem like new psalms taught at an alternative church. Several of these tracks seem unprepared for the public arena, as if I had violatingly stumbled upon them and had not had them presented to me. And then there is "River Of Light" a song I have no intention of ever listening to again. A song that seems all the proof necessary that Peter Gabriel, Mickey Hart, David Byrne and Paul Simon should invoke the Fifth Amendment when asked to take "credit" for the integration of World Music.

Years after the Chernobyl disaster, opera and classical music was piped throughout the vacated towns so that workers wouldn't lose their minds cleaning up a town of empty playgrounds and frozen swingsets. School buses posed in forever-angles of parked ballet. In just three albums Swan and partner Nick Pullin have managed to create such a beautifully dangerous sound all their own that one could imagine never having to need Novocain at a dentist's office if the Ilya sound were piped into your head while you slept the night before the appointment. You would wake to a world never more frightening than the places you voyaged in the night. And at the same time, night would become that drug you return to even during the day. This is never more obvious than on the song "Spring." It is autumnal, gorgeous, and pastoral, and the fact that Swan seems to sing not a single word of a real language is, in this case, a blessing, because I might never have otherwise left the swirling nirvana of that glorious distraction in order to rejoin the real world.

Carving Heads On Cherry Stones is that rare thing, a real experiment by a band that seems to not be hiding any ulterior sales-motive behind its choices. For all the acts that Ilya is often compared to (Portishead, Goldfrapp, M83) I can't imagine another band willing to expose itself so bare and vulnerable. Though there is no single defining moment on this album (They Died For Beauty and Somerset are chock full of stunner after masterpiece after stunner), there are several moments that make you hopeful and impatient for the next direction Swan and Pullin waltz you toward.

—Thomas Cooney