space, as they say, is a place. For Sun Ra, who coined the phrase
butchered just there, space was a cosmically colorful place, full of
alien joyrides and unexplored planets. But space can be dark and cold,
lifeless and lonely. Seattle’s Tiny Vipers, aka singer-songwriter Jesy
Fortino, is an intrepid explorer of this latter kind of space, a lone,
slow-drifting voice in the void whose glacially paced and galactically
spacious folk songs almost make all that nothingness feel comfortably
lulling.
The title of her sophomore album, Life on Earth (out this
week on Sub Pop), suggests perhaps a more vital, material world than
what was grappled with on debut Hands Across the Void, but like
that album, Earth’s defining feature is a feeling of absence, of space.
Earth hangs alone in the blackness; life is surrounded by death’s
shadow.
On opening track “Eyes Like Ours,” Fortino sings, in her slightly,
oddly accented voice (Canadian? Midwestern? Werewolf?), about when “the
world was still young… just a small town.” On the title
track—the album’s centerpiece at over 10 minutes long—over
an ominous, slightly western, slightly medieval melody, Fortino sings,
“I call out to the night/Though I can see that there’s nothing at
all.”
There’s also more literal space—the chasms of stillness in
between Fortino’s spare guitar picking and low, intoned, hollowly
resonant vocals, the distances implied in their echoing. The album is
just over an hour long, but its songs unspool and stretch out so
patiently as to feel like an eternity (not necessarily a bad
thing—music’s ability to alter your sense of time is one of its
great traits).
Which is not to say the album is all somnolence and pitch-black.
Though the chords are melancholy and the lyrics are typically dour (and
maybe a touch supernatural), Fortino’s singing flickers from sullen hum
to a high, arcing spark, her voice giving off some subtle warmth
against the vast night. 