The alchemical art-folk of Shannon Wright turns the familiar into the
utterly alien. Sounds, bits of melodies, her voice-you swear that
you've heard them before. Then a sudden shift occurs; you realize
that Wright is using various phrases and melodies as mere reference
points, markers directing you to some undiscovered country. Barely
over a half hour long, the music and lyrics are as dense as a
Faulkner
novel. Angular jazz melts into haunted bordello music, morphing
into
brittle mountain hillbilly songs before being overwhelmed by
mathematically precise rhythms . The acoustic sections spatter and
fragment, before acknowledging studio treatments and/or sampling.
Her
voice at various times is girlish and whispery, like Cranes singer
Alison Shaw, or harsh like Mary Margaret O'Hara. Other times, she'll
scream. Wright is not afraid to sound ugly, vulnerable or pretty.
The music is sparse, but it's too well-crafted to describe as lo-fi.
Wright plays most of the instruments, and is assisted by a couple
drummers. Lyrically, she uses economical, cryptic, imagery to
describe an almost nihilistic state of mind. Her words are beautiful
and maddeningly obtuse. There is a feeling of 'outsider art' in some
of the images; other times, the words are like arcane equations. A
taste of her lyrical oddness is reveals in song titles: "Within the
Quilt of Demand;" "Flask Welder;" "The Hover is Ajar." She spikes
her distanced verse with doses of humor and pain-it reminds me of the
scene in Altered States when William Hurt, the penultimate scientist
succumbs to the call of the id. Shannon Wright could be placed on
the
shelf with Kristen Hersh and Veda Hille. Which is to say she's an
idiosyncratic original.
http://www.southern.com/southern/band/SHAWR/