Yellow Ostrich
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The focal point of the songs on Yellow Ostrich's magnificent debut 'The Mistress' is Alex Schaaf's tender, pleading voice. It's a reedy, childlike instrument, and on 'The Mistress' it gets looped and layered, stretched, manipulated; it's stacked up several high and, most often, it's used as an instrument, fleshing out the empty spaces in his bare, searching songs. Aside from a pulsing bass guitar, it's the only sound on 'Hold On' a kaleidoscope of "ohs" spiraling around Schaaf's heartbroken opening: "Now that we've started, it's sad to see it end."
That's fitting: Schaaf is a secretary of the interior, and 'The Mistress', his stunning, fully-realized debut as Yellow Ostrich, is as personal a document as they come. The record, which Schaaf recorded by himself in his bedroom in Wisconsin (before moving to New York in 2010), came together quickly, all of it generating from a single central notion. "I had this idea of working with looped vocals," Schaaf says, "I wanted to use them not so much as a melodic thing, but as a strong, rhythmic element. Once I had that general concept, I wrote most of the songs in about a week."
The upside of putting such deliberate emphasis on Schaaf's voice is that it creates a sense of intimacy. You hear the songs on 'The Mistress' the way he first heard them: as bare, hummed melodies floating around in the subconscious, with only a few instrumental hash marks holding them together, a splotch of guitar here, a thunk of piano there.
Schaaf's day job is digitizing old Super 8 home movies from the '40s and '50s, and that's fitting, there's a kind of yellowed nostalgia to 'The Mistress', dragged kicking and screaming into the modern age. The musical simplicity is fitting: most of Schaaf's lyrics are the kinds of intimate confessions that get whispered from one person to another in the small hours of the morning.
Such intense focus on arranging is not exactly incidental. Schaaf is a
graduate of Lawrence University's Conservatory of Music in Wisconsin,
where he learned the ground rules of being in a band with local outfit
The Chairs while recording sparer, quieter Yellow Ostrich songs on his
own. As his years in school drew to a close, Schaaf knew he needed
change. "I wanted the opposite of small town Wisconsin," he says. "Not
in a good or in a bad way, just something that was the opposite of what
I'd known. That's kind of how I operate -- I do something for a week and
then I'm tired of it, so I want to do the opposite."
He moved to New York with 'The Mistress' fully complete, and set about the task of
transforming Yellow Ostrich from a solo project to a bona fide band.
"When I got to New York, I contacted Michael [Tapper], because I'd seen
him play before. I asked him, 'Hey, if you happen to know any
drummers...,' but in the back of my mind, I was hoping it would be him."
Michael had known bassist Jon Natchez from several different projects,
and soon invited him to join the band as well. Three songs added to this
version of 'The Mistress' - new takes on old Yellow Ostrich songs
'Bread' and 'Fog', along with a different version of 'Mary' provide a
tantalizing glimpse at where the trio may be heading.
But as much as the band has grown together over the course of the last
10 months, in the end, 'The Mistress' is a product of Schaaf's
vision, its songs centered around his vivid, often surreal fairy tales.
"The idea of the 'Mistress' is that it is something almost entirely
built in your imagination - you have all of these vivid and intense
feelings and ideas, but they are directed towards something that you
know nothing about," Schaaf explains. "You just create an image in your
head of what you think perfection is, and you project that image onto
your future or onto your everyday life, and never try and see the whole
picture." Indeed, as the songs progress, that darker undercurrent slowly
surfaces, like a manta gliding just below the surface of the ocean. " A
lot of the songs came from that feeling of blind imagination, and the
things that happen when that imagination clashes with your actual
everyday life."
The songs on 'The Mistress' exist within that push-and-pull the allure of blind fantasy chased by the bitter sting of reality. Schaaf's voice clangs across 'Libraries' like a church bell pealing in a small town, but its lyrics caution: "Once you leave, all your stories will be gone." The few moments Schaaf boldly busts out of the bedroom are arresting: 'Hate Me Soon' explodes into a kind of Jack White tantrum, bruised blues licks throwing knuckles as Schaaf wails over and over, "You're gonna hate me soon!" between the blows, reveling in that moment where the fantasy of infatuation gives way to frustration and anger.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in 'Mary', a song that begins with optimism and encouragement but crests on a sudden, startling note of despair: "Mary, you are doing drugs, don't you think we know?" Schaaf sings, crestfallen. The confrontation is followed by a crushing silence, before Schaaf's voice, all six harmonizing iterations of it returns, a soothing cascade of sound. He sings only a single open syllable, but the meaning is clear: Schaaf's intention is not to judge it's to comfort.
