tracy bonham: masts of manhatta

Most famous for her Grammy-nominated 1996 debut The Burdens Of Being Upright, Tracy Bonham has operated largely under the radar for much of the past decade, and Masts Of Manhatta arrives in a similar fashion: with minimal fanfare, on an independent label, but deserving of a much wider audience. Having moved back to her beloved Brooklyn from LA, the recently-married Bonham describes the making of the album as very freeing, with no one looking over her shoulder, and the result shows the artist on experimental and intriguing form.

Taking its title from a Walt Whitman poem, Masts Of Manhatta explores the balance of city and country life at its core. The musical backing is intimate and elegant, with a Tom Waits-like quality that becomes less surprising upon reading that Bonham worked on the record with guitarist Smokey Hormel, whose previous collaborations include not only Waits but Beck, Rufus Wainwright and many others. Lead track ‘Devil’s Got Your Boyfriend’ is a fantastically slinky opener; Bonham’s insouciant, semi-spoken delivery is countered by a sensual higher vocal line, and the instrumentation is sparse, consisting mostly of a spare drum and bass rhythm track augmented by violin and subtle keyboards.

‘Your Night Is Wide Open’ feels a bit more lo-fi, with Bonham singing to a repetitive guitar line before bringing in barely-audible keyboards and double-tracked vocals. Midway through, however, it takes on a grungey quality as in comes a spiky bassline, drums and more guitar. It’s just one example of mood over melody, symptomatic also of the bluesy ‘Big Red Heart’, which boasts a light funk groove, and the hypnotic, off-kilter ‘Josephine’. The latter, with its simple hook of “woah-oh-oh, baby please don’t go”, takes on a vaguely vaudevillian quality, but other songs like ‘When You Laugh The World Laughs With You’ and the excellent ‘We Moved Our City To The Country’ are more conventionally pretty.

Musically, ‘We Moved Our City To The Country’ is one of the record’s most sophisticated numbers, changing rhythm and tempo about three minutes in to incorporate a gorgeous violin line before tailing off into a spooky coda with reverb-laden guitars and wordless vocals. Bonham’s writing is fresh and witty (“Our kids will make friends with local kids / and they will LOL a lot”), with one choice lyric about the perils of driving an SUV. Elsewhere, she enlists growling basslines (‘You’re My Isness’), elegant piano balladry (‘Reciprocal Feelings’) and more straightforward country stylings (‘Angel, Won’t You Come Down’), before signing off with St Vincent-like epilogue ‘I Love You Today’ with its bass-heavy setup and multitracked vocals.

Masts Of Manhatta loses points for a shyness of brevity. While it only runs to eleven songs, too many stretch up to and over five minutes and at times it feels as though a little more energy wouldn’t go amiss. For the most part, however, it’s a subtly nuanced, intelligent record, and it’s great to hear Bonham flexing her creative strength with some different approaches.

[Lojinx; July 13, 2010]

Written by: Matt Barton

Tags: masts of manhatta, tracy bonham

This entry was posted on Monday, August 2nd, 2010 at 8:40 am and is filed under albums & EPs, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.