Nick Jaina
A Bird In The Opera House
Rating: 4.0/5.0
Label: Hush Records
It’s spring, and this recovering goth’s fancy turns lightly (okay, maybe darkly) to thoughts of love. That kind of endeavor requires a soundtrack, of course, and you couldn’t find a better, more hopelessly romantic one than Nick Jaina’s latest, A Bird In The Opera House.
Maybe it’s cheating to know that Jaina has spent his fair share of time in New Orleans (he currently resides in Portland, which shares a similarly dark undercurrent). Like the Big Easy, his music is a beguiling blend of darkness and light — glimmers of hope juxtaposed with a resigned acknowledgment of doom, delivered in a woozy, almost boozy fashion and accented by tasteful horns, strings and haunted chorals. From the opening notes, it’s pretty obvious that this isn’t your average singer/songwriter. Jaina is a masterful storyteller, and most of his tales feel like they stepped out of another time altogether — a noirish era, where innocence and danger cast long shadows.
A Bird In The Opera House’s songs are populated with debutantes, officers, sailors, soldiers and widows, not to mention lovesick protagonists who seem to understand they’re doomed from the beginning, but are under too much of a spell to care. Fallen officers (“Officer Schoppe”) and childhood nostalgia (“Strawberry Man”) provide poignant vignettes, but it’s fated romanticism that carries the album. In fact, Jaina is more than a storyteller — he’s a conduit, and his lovelorn songs wouldn’t resonate so strongly if he didn’t inhabit his characters and clothe them so beautifully. A Bird In The Opera House sounds like New Orleans looks — stately, outside of time, beautiful and haunted.
Love is the siren’s song that’s lured many to dash themselves upon its rocks, and you’ll find plenty of its victims here. In the album opener, “Sebastopol,” Jaina croons, “Your eyes tell so many tales/ Your eyes tell so many wild, wild tales” before he gets to the meat of the matter- “and I only want to believe.” You can feel it’s a bad idea, but it’s impossible not to get swept up in romance of the moment.
“Another Song For Kay” continues the waltz with doom. “It doesn’t matter what you do/ I’m blindly in love with you,” Jaina states as a mantra. Anyone who’s ever fallen in love with the wrong person — and known it from the beginning — can relate. The sparse “Days In My Room”, with its “notes of lilacs” hanging in the air, is breathtaking in its resignation, while the subtle emotional nuance of “I Don’t Believe You” (which sounds like an accusation until you get to “I don’t believe you/ You say love is not enough“) is just plain heartbreaking. “If wine is blood/ This bar is the abattoir,” Jaina sings with almost a carefree air on “Sleep Child;” “We have slaughtered every night of our lives.”
That kind of decadence — and its cousin, nostalgia — loom large in A Bird In The Opera House. If you think that sounds depressing, you’re clearly not a hopeless romantic or a recovering goth. If it sounds intriguing and beautiful, you’ve just found your spring soundtrack.
by Barbara Mitchell
