Forty-four years ago, a lady from Los Angeles you’ve probably never heard of released a record called “Parallelograms.” It was at once mellow but vivacious, pastoral but worldly. The album sold incredibly poorly, so the lady decided to call it quits and return to her day job as a dental technician.
But over the past four decades, “Parallelograms” has slowly and steadily developed a sort of cult status in certain circles, including those of freak-folkie Devendra Banhart and prog metal act Opeth. Spurned by affirmation from her auspicious fan base (Banhart convinced her to sing backup vocals on “Freely” from his 2007 album “Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon”), Linda Perhacs has written and recorded a follow-up four decades in the waiting, entitled “The Soul of All Natural Things” and due out this week.
Like her debut, Perhacs’ sophomore effort strives to achieve less than the sum of its parts and largely succeeds in doing so. Each track functions as a self-sustaining microenvironment jam-packed with small sounds. Harpsichord, violin, acoustic guitar, digital drums and multi-tracked vocals occupy each moment but never compete, like the sounds of summer bugs on a deeply wooded night. The washes of mellifluous noise are direct rather than diffuse, cooperating to distill each tune to its simple, haunting melody.
Check out the album-opening title track, in which Perhacs’ multi-tracked self harmonies float over gentle, percolating flamenco guitar as barely-there synths drip out from within the collage.
Classical piano and Perhacs’ voice take swaps in the spotlight on “Freely,” one of the record’s most simply crafted tunes. Her voice exchanges one pitch for another with confidence and tact, soaring into the cocoon of its own echo at the end of each phrase.
While it’s at the front of our minds, a quick word on Ms. Perhacs’ voice, which at age 70 has not unexpectedly relinquished a meager portion of the fullness and elasticity it conveyed in the year 1970. But she certainly hasn’t lost it, as her beautiful contralto often connotes an ideal synthesis of Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” era octave-hopping majesty and the mature, slight-twang sweetness of contemporary Emmylou Harris.
She obviously hasn’t just been cleaning teeth the past 40 years, as several of the record’s most successful tracks blend her retro pastoral acousticism with subtle synth burbles. The repetitive, pop-savvy chorus and whooshing synth filigrees of “Immunity” suggest a wizened, drowsy Ellie Goulding.
Drowsy makes for a pretty good way of looking at “The Soul of All Natural Things.” Nothing jumps out and blares at you upon first listening, but there’s a lush, warm-Sunday-afternoon beauty to these 45-odd minutes of sound that will at the very least grab you enough to want to go back and check out “Parallelograms.” A two-hour investment in two records seems fair, considering it took her 44 thoughtful years to get ‘em along to us.
