33 rebellions per minute
1998
Sinead Lohan, NO MERMAID
I'm not sure if my musical tastes have started wimping out in the past year or if I'm simply benefitting, information-wise, from the tastes from my fellow Loud-fans glenn mcdonald and Michael Zwirn, but sudenly I have quite a few elegant, mid-to-slow-tempo, calm, extremely pretty, female-sung records lying around, holding their alphabetical positions near my Foetus Interruptus or 12 Rods or, in this case, Loud Family records. NO MERMAID, an assured American debut (second album total), has quickly emerged among my very favorites of the style, floating musically within a loose stylistic triangle of 10,000 Maniacs' articulate big-80's folk-pop IN MY TRIBE, the smooth but somewhat unsettling pop of Neil Finn's TRY WHISTLING THIS, and the Enya album of your choice (I own WATERMARK).
Ms Lohan's voice is clear and on-pitch and reasonably expressive, ranging from high notes around what Enya would sound like without all the double-tracking, to a lower, and very slightly jagged, range nearer to Shona Laing. The lyrics aim for subtlety, have a discouraging tendency to confuse me at their most interesting points, and focus on power dynamics in romantic relationships, though she _is_ enough of a romantic that she'd probably deny that. The arrangements, by Lohan with Lisa Germano's ever-inventive sidekick Malcolm Burn, place synthesizers and real drums in the tuneful forefront, but fill in with unexpected offbeat instruments and sounds played by Malcolm.
They veer far enough to include "Loose Ends" and "Hot On Your Trail"-- spare, smoky, warped-bass-driven equivalents to Neil Finn's "Sinner" and "Twisty Bass" that benefit, at least in my heterosexist opinion, from Lohan being a far more compelling singer-- as well as the percussive, fluttery, Aboriginal "Believe It If You Like" and the insistent near-monotone of "People And Tables" (which unexpectedly is one of my favorites here). The rhythmic sense is nice too: hear how the infatuation song "Out Of The Woods" divides its standard time signature into a 3-3-2, rather than 4-4, combining the rhythmic compulsion of waltz and rock, or how "Diving To Be Deeper" flexibly places its emphasized beats around her words rather than the usual vice versa, or how "...Tables"'s defiant chorus insists on taking up an extra beat and making the music, and the listener adjust. These details do what it takes to give the record structure and variety and distinction; without them, I wouldn't regard it as a great record. But it would still be lovely, and I'd still play it fairly often.
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