Artist: Mann, Aimee
Label: SuperEgo Records
Release: 2012
Length: 38:03
Rating: 4.5/5
Aime Mann is an American singer who struck out on her own in 1993, after releasing three well-received, high-quality alternative rock albums with ‘Til Tuesday, all of them shaped by catchy melodic pop. Charmer is her eighth studio album and, to this day, really the closest she’s come to her first two albums and her ‘Til Tuesday career.
We had to wait until the eighth, that is, until »Charmer«. And Aimee has definitely not lost her charm. Here she’s found the perfect balance between the pop catchiness of those long-ago ‘Til Tuesday albums and the black clouds that have always chased around her mind, and that had weighed her recent albums down more and more into hard-to-»read« listening material. »Charmer« is an album with no weak moment, no moment that goes down hard in the »stomach«, no dips in quality from track to track. At the same time, it serves up an impressive range of varied compositions, brilliantly arranged, where Aimee’s distinctive, pleasant, gently caressing and deeply feeling vocals shine at their absolute best. Charmer is an album you can honestly spin at any moment of the day and in any situation. Whether you’re in a great mood or feeling depressed. Because it glides, with acrobatic perfection, masterfully along the thin dividing line between the two mental states.
In the studio, Aimee continues to work with top-notch musicians who have dozens of collaborations behind them with some of the most successful artists on the world music scene. Among them are bassist Paul Bryan and drummer Jay Bellerose, who recently worked on material for Tanita Tikaram’s new studio album »Can’t Go Back« (2012), while guitarist and keyboardist Chris Bruce is becoming a tried-and-tested fixture of Aimee’s studio collaborations.
Aimee wrote all the compositions herself, except for Living A Lie (The Shins vocalist James Mercer contributes a phenomenal vocal duet here), which was written together with Paul Bryan, and Soon Enough, which came out of Aimee’s collaboration with film director, comedian and musician Tim Heidecker. Aimee plays her ace of basically simple arrangements, which brings the lightness and ease of songwriting into a landscape of trivially solvable compactness. Over it all reigns an exceptional feel for the melodic beat. The album sounds bright and positive, even in the moments when Aimee dishes out more heartache, and where the thread of her early-career messaging is intensely picked up again on the new album in the song Crazytown, where the softness and sophistication of Aimee’s vocals are especially striking.
Alongside this deeply felt vocal performance, a bittersweet mix, the instruments behave like gentle drapes stretched into a creation of unpretentious, barely perceptible soundscape, which supports the juicy fullness of Aimee Mann’s vocal delivery and magnifies it further. The balance is remarkable. The dialogue between keyboards and organically alive guitar colors comes across as authentically indie rock. The guitar is occasionally brought close to an R.E.M.-style jangle pop sound (Dissapeared), and the album’s overall sonic picture is extremely dense, dynamic and fully tangible. The keyboards are often reinforced with organs and classic piano. In such an environment the guitar also swings out loudly, but stays modest in its solo flights, unobtrusive, tucked away in the background, which is nicely illustrated by the great way it fills the space in the outro of Soon Enough. In Gamma Ray, though, the guitar dangerously plows in at the start in volume, in a glow of generous tastefulness, which makes this, besides the title track, the liveliest song on the album.
»Charmer« could be described as a kind of mature, you could say grown-up-listener-oriented, pop psychedelic odyssey, which leans on one side toward alternative sounds and on the other toward country impulses, as in the closing Red Flag Diver, or Gumby. In Barfly and Slip And Roll you can find, in the tried-and-true school of songwriting, even a few shards of blues. So this is an exceptional musical condensation rich in meaning, one that keeps the listener busy not only with the powerful content of Aimme Mann’s poetry, but also with the coloring of the remarkable soundscapes of the instrumental accompaniment. And over all of this reigns the polished melodicism of the songs, which, in the retro sonic spectrum of warm production, radiates a distant reflection of The Beatles at the time they leapt to greater art definition (read: from the album »Rubber Soul« upward).
»Charmer« is an album of masterful cultivation of that one-of-a-kind feeling of lightly measured strokes, short but concise. It is without doubt Aimee Mann’s strongest release since her second album »I’m with Stupid«, if not since her work with ‘Til Tuesday. An album of exceptional character insight, a strong singer-songwriter touch and independent charm, which, through the feeling longing of Aimee Mann’s sensibility, comes across with an intensity few albums in Aimee Mann’s career can match. It’s simply a record where all the elements are woven together in perfect balance. Most importantly, the album offers an exceptional dose of listenability and full-blooded sensitivity, which, in Aimee’s performance, gets under your skin in an instant. The songs are set up so that the more gently you play them, the bigger the impression they leave when you listen.
Lineup
Aimee Mann -vocals, guitar
Chris Bruce – guitar, piano
Jamie Edwards – guitar, piano, keyboards, bells
David Boucher – piano
Jebin Bruni – keyboards, piano
Paul Bryan – bass guitar, backing vocals
Jay Bellerose – drums, percussion
J. J. Johnson – drums
Michael Penn – backing vocals
GUEST MUSICIAN:
James Mercer – vocals on track no. 6
Production
Paul Bryan
Track list
1. Charmer (3:25)
2. Disappeared (3:24)
3. Labrador (3:49)
4. Crazytown (3:21)
5. Soon Enough (3:59)
6. Living a Lie (3:26)
7. Slip and Roll (4:12)
8. Gumby (2:53)
9. Gamma Ray (3:00)
10. Barfly (4:00)
11. Red Flag Diver (2:29)
