It’s not the first time this week we’ve spoken about the stripping away of extraneous elements in music. When Tompkins Square label owner Josh Rosenthal recently spoke about guitarist Mason Lindahl, he described the successful end result as “…an artist staying in a zone, not caring about variation for variation’s sake, content with an artistic statement that doesn’t move from its core.”
Whether you are talking song, music, or in the case of Lael Neale, both, getting there takes a lot of courage.
Lael Neale talks of such a paradox when introducing her Sub Pop full-length debut album Acquainted With Night. One of her strongest anchor-points appears to be poetry, concerning writing, she says, “this challenge to winnow away what is unessential is the most maddening and, ultimately, rewarding part of writing a song.”
Acquainted with the Night is described as a testament to this poetic devotion. Stripped of any extraneous word or sound, the songs are lit by Lael’s crystalline voice which lays on a lush bed of Omnichord – that strange Japanese electronic instrument first introduced in 1981 by the Suzuki Musical Instrument Corporation which the likes of Jane Weaver, who we wrote about earlier today, also enjoys playing. That said, the first single to be shared ‘Blue Vein‘, the video for which you can watch below, is played on guitar:
“I wrote this song pre-Omnichord and it is the only recording I play guitar on. I wrote it around New Year’s Eve and it felt like a resolution.”
Although Los Angeles has been her home for the last 10 years, Lael was raised on a farm in rural Virginia. She returned there back in April 2020 and has taken advantage of the limitations imposed by this period. She re-discovered her Sony Handycam from high school and is using it to make impressionistic companion pieces to the songs she recorded in Los Angeles. She continues, “I am enjoying the strong contrast between the songs I wrote and recorded in California and the videos I am making for them in Virginia. It offers something unexpected.”
These analogue films are like the third layer – while some may consider the format quite raw and dated by today’s sterile standards (I am biased), there is an undeniable quality to these self-directed videos that work so well here. A testament to poetic devotion? Most certainly.
Acquainted With Night is released 19th February 2021 on Sub Pop – https://smarturl.it/LaelNeale_AWN