Music

Love Lies Bleeding

You Should Be at This Show Here

by Jeff DeRoche

You Should Be at Home Here, the new release from Seattle's Carissa's Wierd, begins with "Brooke Daniel's Tiny Broken Fingers," a song that rises to the sad occasion of its lengthy, fragile title. Most present at the onset is a woeful violin line that sounds isolated and terribly lonely. The song's narrator recalls Daniel's screams, wondering, "How was I to know? I did not think those screams were for real." Her hand was, apparently, smashed in a doorjamb. There's a feeling of panic underlying the song, which builds to a galloping yet surgically attended climax, led by the band's refined and talented drummer, Ben Bridwell.

The addition of an accordion lends a swaying, European feel, a sense of existential dread to the pieces gathered here. The songs are haunted and observational. Near the end of "The Color That Your Eyes Changed, With the Color of Your Hair," there's an elegant harmony between Mat Brooke and Jenn Ghetto, the band's two vocalists. The piece itself is a sad, blurry waltz--ending it with the harmonized lyrics, "My heart is gone, my heart is gray," creates, again, a sense of despair, of time and memory having managed to float past the narrator, recounted in a somber moment of displacement. But the heart has not given up on this record. You Should Be at Home Here is shot through with quelled but ever-present desire.

This is the second record by the band, and it improves upon the excellent Ugly but Honest in its production (Chris Walla), its use of Jenn Ghetto (raised volume on her vocal parts), the multiplicity of violin and accordion tracks, and the record's subsequent, subtle grandeur, as on "Blessed Arms That Hold You Tight, Freezing Cold and Alone." Ghetto punctuates the title phrase, as well as the refrain, "It's all long good-byes," lending the otherwise straightforward lyrics an ephemeral beauty that the band would otherwise be unable to attain, even with the sway and shimmer of violin and accordion that treat You Should Be at Home Here. What Jenn Ghetto does in a nondeliberate breath, most singers spend lifetimes attempting. Hyperbole? See the show and buy the record.

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