A good friend of mine’s daughter studied at Arizona State University and she was very very happy and went on to a lustrous career in finance and now makes more money than my friend and I combined. Which should be a shocker since the huge five campuses is this gorgeous 5 star hotel for co-eds ready for a last hurrah, it is a wild in the streets youth city.
Yup, Phoenix is one of the great college towns and I mention this not just because 16 year old modern day indie folkie Taylor Upstahl is from Phoenix but because if she wasn’t she should be. ASU has 83,000 students, it breaths modern pop and when you have that sort of student body, the radio is soon to follow, so might bet is Taylor has had cutting edge pop in her ears all her life. It explains a lot of things, it explains Upstahl and her young friend Rachel Rinsema’s sublime cover of alt-j’s “Freezeblocks” from two years ago (here) The harmonies lock in together and the playing is almost ridiculously innocent as they stare down the camera and share the track. alt-j is a generation after Radiohead and the definition of a college band -though if Rachel was looking something more interesting then the obvious Hosier today, she’d be covering Foals
Earlier in 2013, the then 14 year old Taylor released her eponymous debut album, which opened with the Regina Spektorish “The Yes song” -a track so strong, she should have put it third on the album. Taylor, with Rachel singing close harmony, caress the song with a light beauty and the song has a weary consciousness. They remind me of the Roches, and Rachel’s songs reminded me of Paul Simon’s earliest wodisciprk, the giveaway being a straight faced earnestness that takes itself way too seriously. I guess a fourteen year old claiming “the heart wants what the heart wants” is the definition of precocious, except Rachel never slips, she never gives up on her folk pop leanings or over sings or plays off her age, willing to ride a two note song all the way to the end and beyond on one song and always singing on behalf of her song, always putting it first, Taylor’s sincerity keeps the album sweet and honest.
Two years later and Viscerotonic, the now sixteen year old is making her move from local phenom to another Taylor, Maria Taylor, type pop music. The first song of the album “Sunflower” is ridiculously sticky, as tuneful as possible and while still a lo fi indie pop concern it is so professional you wonder when they are going to be sending it to Saddlecreek.
The opening track “Portrait Pattern” is livelier than anything on the first album, while still a mid tempo jaunt, the drums signify strongly and the beat is accented. It moves along and instead of indie or folk, there is a refracted artiness about it. Though the rest of the album doesn’t do this, the rest of the album also doesn’t attempt to do this. Still even when it is most tears on my guitar and folkie two sides now, “Spilt Coffee” I’m thinking about, the vocal arrangements pull it through.
When I was sixteen years old I was picking my nose and lying about the girls I kissed, Taylor is both age astute and also disciplined beyond her years. when you are releasing pop albums with eleven songs in 33 minutes, what you are doing is restraining any self serving love’s labors lost stuff and putting everything into the songs themselves. The pun on visceral (ergo about feelings not ideas) in the album name is revealing, the sort of multi level thing that is going on all over the album. Like her voice, which moves between soprano and instead of going deeper goes higher when she wants to underline a feeling she is coming at from any angle.
It is music for a peer group dealing with similar battles between theory and practice, how things feel and how they are, the emotional range is noticeable and the disquiet is tempered, sometimes distempered by mooted desire: it is all burgeoning lushness and self awareness. Sixteen years old , but sixteen years old unblinking looking into the heart, and sometimes into the dark.
Taylor is a very good songwriter, though I wouldn’t mind hearing her veer into a more metronomic and also more fully enriched mutations. The songs stand on their own, but why must they? A track like “Side B” is an arrangement away from mainstream, I mean a reversal of what she did with “Freezeblocks”.
Till then, Viscerotonic will do nicely.
Grade: B+
As it says clearly on the cover of the album it’s Upsahl… Not Upstahl. If you are going to do a mediocore review where you get the song titles wrong and confusingly mention a backup vocalist as if she is the lead singer, the VERY least you could do is get artist you’re doing a review for name right. Also maybe try spell check or even re-read your own writing before posting you next review. Way to half ass it!
PS: the two paragraphs about ASU… What?! Yeah totally relevant to this review.