Diane Cluck - Monarcana
Very Friendly, 2006
This album is like the bleeding heart of lost America, oozing desperation and dust out of its aorta, letting the thick blood pour onto sand, not because it’s dying, but because that’s the only thing left for it to do. Diane Cluck started off as somewhat of an alternative and watered down Regina Spektor, and yet this album was recorded from 2001-2004, overlaying her musical output at the time. Like the sculpture in Drawing Restraint 9, this is the waste product of a bigger project, yet its value is far greater than would be expected: Diane Cluck manages to sculpt it into a petroleum jelly bast of the 21st Century’s mind.
That’s not to say the lyrics are a zeitgest to our Id’s, as might be expected. Unlike Cluck’s usual work, there’s no intricate weaving of themes and words—barring Parlor Trick where she sings of “the deep and rosure kisses that spring only to existence in the instances your lips come into knowing mine.” But this, like most of the album, gives way to brutal minimalism:
oh
you beauty
i can’t
bear you
i have
wished to tend to you
i half
wanna tear you
no no no no no no no
i don’t mean
i want to hurt you
i just want to love you
all the way
all the way
oh
and yet, in those simple words she speaks more than any angst-ridden and eye-liner wearing band of the past decade: eschewing verbosity for simple cutting lyrics and never forgetting the power of her voice. This whole album is that moment on Skinny Love where Justin Vernon’s voice wavers a little and he shouts out his soul into the microphone. For a record where the majority of it is just her, her guitar, and feedback, it can be a tiring listen as she pulls your heartstrings into 50 different directions.
This is all coupled with some of the most discordant harmonies to ever approach beauty—like Oh Vanille, her magnus opus, Diane Cluck never lets you know whether she’s multitracking or simply using a group of her friends, layering voice upon voice upon voice until some tracks approach nothing but a series of infinite echos: one voice singing, but a thousand ones in reply. If Nick Drake’s soft, calming yet disturbed voice was the mirror for the early 70’s, then this is the the one for the early 00’s and its obsession with the media fire of our lives: self-destructive, introspective, minimalistic and desperate.
11 Pipers Piping/12 Days of Christmas
Review by David
Tracklist
1. Snake
2. Beatless Wonder
3. Real Good Time
4. Countless Times
5. Countless Times
6. Lucifer
7. Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony
8. Diamonds
9. Gardenovena
10. Leave Me Alone
11. My Virtue’s Gone (Hooray Hooray)
12. Reverly
13. Dilapidalliance
14. Reveller
15. (Untitled)
16. Modern Day
17. Parlor Trick
18. (Untitled)
19. Pray Headaches Away
20. Honed. Hemmed In.
21. Nothing But God
22. (Untitled)
23. If You See Sunlight
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