There is a unique and anomalous adeptness in filling a chasm with a single breath. With open palms and scraped knees, Tiny Vipers, pseudonym of Seattle’s Jesy Fortino, offer the second Sub Pop released album after Hands Across the Void, Life on Earth, an hour long example of how the most seemingly bare concepts can embrace more power and movement than a hurtling freight train. As a general diagnosis, personable draw to music is solidified by the ability an artist harbors to the immeasurable number of human conditions. For all the open wounds, raw nerves and complications of an audience, the relationship can be as beneficially healing as it is traumatic. These varied metaphorical ailments inevitably require varied prescriptions or sutures and Fortino’s remedy is a sorely needed placebo in a world where apathy has replaced empathy. Delivered through a curbed acoustic backbone holding up a cage of lyrical broken ribs, Fortino lyrically embraces a vulnerable yet shyly guarded heart. As individual parts, there isn’t a great deal of variety between the ten tracks, although certain elements do occasionally tease with rise but then calmly fall back on themselves such as Time Takes and the ten minute title track Life on Earth, but as a whole Life on Earth (the album) is an ardent composition, bold and confident in the moments that don’t exist as much as the one’s that do. As you are taken through Fortino’s journey it becomes increasingly apparent that we are not watching the dirt beneath our bare feet, all eyes are fixed on the horizon.
Key Tracks: Dreamer, Young God, Tiger Mountain, Twilight Property
Moods: Yearning, Somber, Hypnotic, Delicate, Austere, Atmospheric
Buy: Life On Earth
related
- The Flaming Lips – Christmas on Mars
- Motion City Soundtrack – My Dinosaur Life
- Gord Downie and The Country of Miracles – The Grand Bounce
