wears the trousers magazine

Alessi’s Ark
The Horse EP •••½
Virgin

The Horse isn’t exactly what you’d expect from 18-year-old Londoner Alessi, collectively known with sometime family band members as Alessi’s Ark. All evidence to date had pointed towards her occupying the same kind of folk territory as notable influence Joanna Newsom, sitting firmly in the ‘girl and her stringed instruments’ niche. With Mike Mogis of Bright Eyes fame on production duties, however, the EP takes Alessi’s songs several steps ahead, bringing across the rich and often saturated sound displayed on such records as Jenny Lewis’s Rabbit Fur Coat.

Opener ‘The Horse’ is very much like the crunch of these two distinct styles meeting for the first time. In previous versions, Alessi has kept matters simple, allowing her voice ample space to capture the ambivalent mix of hope, doubt and sarcasm in the chorus: “If you’d like me to, I’ll try to be brave like you”. The EP version drowns out the nuances with schmaltzy backing singing and awkward use of the güiro, and is so laidback it almost fails to go anywhere at all. As it did with Lewis, this treatment is no doubt supposed to imbue the otherwise summery arrangement with a sense of world-weariness and heavy irony. While this works with the ex-Hollywood brat, it sounds out of place on someone as youthful and shy as Alessi. In spite of this, ‘The Horse’ will probably do the job of getting her noticed, simply because the strange pairing of the new folk icons with mobile phone ads has created a market for songs of the gentle and pretty variety. 

It feels like the stylistic marriage begins to work much better on second track, ‘Neighbour’s Birds’. The creepy opening line, “What’s behind your eyes”, plays on the babydoll qualities of Alessi’s voice to menacing effect, before breaking into an oddly pleasing bluesy swagger that mixes well with the harpsichord. Similarly, ‘Let’s Race’ plays off the contrast between Alessi’s performance and Mogis’s production, gradually adding layers of sound then closing with barely audible, shimmering strings.

While the title track plays up to standard folk clichés, to Alessi’s credit the rest of The Horse really shows her appetite for experimenting with her musical style in pursuit of something new. That is an admirable quality in someone so young, though perhaps to be expected from a girl who quit school at 16 to pursue music full-time. It’s a gamble that really pays off on closer ‘Patchwork Of Dreams’, where Alessi shows just how good she can be. Sounding new and fresh, Alessi blows away any lazy comparisons to Newsom or Feist here as her voice takes on a keening, soulful edge, especially when singing: “What’s the use in goodbye when the hello is so good”. Which, in itself, is quite a neat summary. The Horse: an excellent hello to an artist that looks set to produce a pretty dazzling full-length debut in the new year.

Scott Sinclair
UK release date: 08/12/08 

‘The Horse’