Clare & the Reasons:
Arrow

Clare & the Reasons

Label: Frogstand Records








Arrow's immediate predecessor, 2007's The Movie, was a fine debut by Clare & the Reasons that occasionally suffered from a lack of musical diversity. Arrow lacks no such thing, twisting and turning for nearly 50 minutes while maintaining sharp focus on Clare Muldaur's slinky coos and lovely, playful lyrics.

Opener "All the Wine" features Muldaur's crisp, soaring voice and ukulele strums as she fantasizes of a perfect afternoon out. "It's our time!" she sings, overwhelmed by her own imagination and desire. It's a simple little song, but her voice reaches so far above the sun and clouds, it pulls her dream down to Earth. The band enters with understated texture during the last half of the song, and in barely over two minutes, Arrow sets its bar high.

The joy found in day-to-day love and life is Muldaur's muse; even tracks that would seem to be distressing like "Ooh You Hurt Me So," are lifted by a wistful delivery and perfectly layered harmonies. Her Reasons - a rotating cast of musicians grounded by husband and collaborator Olivier Manchon - imbue each cut with life, offering inventive arrangements and the right amount of weight to keep her voice from becoming too saccharine.

"You Got Me" flirts with subtle electronic textures and seductive double-and-triple tracked vocals before building into a rhythmic trance, while the somewhat-faithful Genesis cover "That's All" replaces traditional instrumentation with lively brass and strings. "Perdue a Paris" blends synth backing and French lyrics with live drums, strings, and Magical Mystery Tour-era Beatles horns to create a miniature foreign film soundtrack. The lazy shuffle of "This is the Story" allows its detailed lyrical imagery to shine through; lines like "And underneath the stairs/ Filling up old crates and rusty boxes/ A note flowing drawer/ Carelessly concealed and left ignored/ Oh, nevermind" demand time to discover and process.

Muldaur's voice is the centerpiece of these songs, as it should be - she often sounds as if she's singing from inside your head- high, clear and impossible to ignore. Standouts like "You Getting Me" and "Murder, They Want Murder" somehow leave room for her voice among increasingly complicated and discordant arrangements. The brassy punch after the third chorus in "You Getting Me" shows the band playing a perfect foil to her vocal performance. "Murder, They Want Murder" pushes her vocals forward to the chorus with staccato bass and strings, when all that remains is her disarming vocals, harmonies, pianos and bells. "They will/ Talk about you/ Over breakfast/ Talk about you" she trills, recounting a witnessed murder that may or may not have been entirely imagined among fluttering strings and muted bass drum kicks. "Wake Up (You Sleepy Head)" closes the record, all acoustic guitar and layered vocal harmonies. "Another day/ Needs us, we need it too" she sings, and as the song slowly builds and closes, it looks forward to a tomorrow that doesn't demand perfection.

With an opening line like "I haven't much I want to do/ Would you like to come and do that too?", a listener could be forgiven for inferring modest expectations. Oh, how wrong they'd be. Clare and the Reasons' Arrow is stunningly beautiful orchestral pop, and needs to be heard to be believed.

by Jason Stoff