"Call me Snake"

Julia Holter - Live Recordings
NNA #15

Sometimes—not all the time, mind you; there is precious, little time for "all the time" and considerably more for "sometimes"—I think about nuclear annihilation. Perhaps it's because I was exposed to unhealthy amounts of The Day After on video cassette during my Eighties adolescence. Or possibly it's because there's been much recent discussion regarding how the existing geopolitical climate could lead to a rise in nuclear proliferation. Or maybe, just maybe, it's on account of the stacks of cassette tapes lining a nearby shelf and how this sound recording format may be the only one that survives a nuclear apocalypse. You've seen Escape from New York, right? When important, encoded information needed to be covertly delivered from one party to another, the format that could withstand all the warfare and destruction and Kurt Russell-ness was the cassette tape.

Of course, this has nothing to do with Julia Holter's Live Recordings. Except maybe the track "Pushkin, Inconsolate," which is composed of three elements: the Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter's vocals, her piano playing, and the droning of what sounds likes a lawnmower. The droning builds in volume and then slowly lessens, only to build in volume once more, like the lawnmower operator is cutting grass around Holter and her piano and following a specific pattern, so they keep coming around for another pass. It's like Holter is playing her piano in the middle of Central Park. (Lugging your piano around to exotic locales is actually quite neat.)

Other tracks I especially enjoyed:

• "Beast Wildest." Holter's ghostly vocals and sparse-yet-punchy piano are conflated with what sounds like audio from a foreign film. (The liner notes say the movie clips were provided by Yelena Zhelezov.) The contrast between Holter's elegiac, fragile vocals and the animated, harsh dialogue from the film was titillating.

• "Me Are More Than I Need." Holter's voice reminds me of a more sophisticated version of Galaxie 500's Naomi Yang or the Fall's Brix Smith.

• "Hello, Stranger." Much of Holter's ethereal vocals are indecipherable. On "Hello, Stranger" I thought I caught the line "Seems like a really good time." This, the tune’s protracted, sulky synthesizers, and Holter's drowsy, defeated vocals conjured up the image of a person swallowing a handful of colorful pills and then lying down on a bed and waiting for the fatal warmth that started in their feet to envelope their entire body.