LOST IN THE TREES

SONIC SACTUARY: Lost in the Trees master the art of sadness

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: March 28, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2012/mar/28/sonic-sanctuary-lost-trees-master-art-sadness-ar-1799387/

Lost in the Trees, A Church that Fits Our Needs (Anti-)

There are confessional songwriters, plenty of them. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. There is value and a compelling kind of art in crafting something universal out of what would otherwise be mere journal entries, even if too often there's a certain narcissism involved in turning the vicissitudes of one's life into an open book, regardless of how uniquely painful or elevating the raw materials may be. Rarer is the songwriter who travels beyond the confessional, to an often remote place where putting words to music is a kind of therapy, where easy answers are hard to find and what otherwise might be mere mirror gazing leads beyond the looking glass.

       Ari Picker, a North Carolina singer-songwriter who also happens to be a trained composer and adventurous multi-instrumentalist, can count himself as one of the few who truly fits the latter description. Born and raised outside of Chapel Hill, he was first drawn to indie-rock before decamping for Boston's Berklee School of Music, a jazz-heavy institution where he studied the more obscure and sometimes seemingly lost art of classically based film scoring. Out of this meeting of two very different musical approaches emerged the odd yet oddly natural amalgam that is Lost in the Trees, a loose affiliation of musicians helmed by Picker, that serves as a vehicle for both his deeply personal — at times downright harrowing — poetics, and his penchant for embellishing simple strummed acoustic guitar with a symphony of violins, violas, and cellos, as well as tuba, harp, and the occasional field recording.

       Picker isn't the first singer-songwriter to deploy orchestral strings and the like. The late Elliott Smith earned an Oscar nomination for the indie chamber-pop that characterized his contributions to the Good Will Hunting soundtrack, to name just one relatively recent example. And plenty of rockers, dating back to the Beatles, have retained the services of entire symphony orchestras. But Picker, for all his similarities to a fellow outsider artist like Smith, is an entirely different breed. For starters, he wrote his own charts and he put together his own ensembles for Lost in the Trees’ 2008 debut full-length, All Alone in an Empty House, and the new A Church that Fits Our Needs. And, unlike Smith, an unabashed pop omnivore with a well developed ear for Beatlesque hooks and equal enthusiasm for hushed, fingerpicked acoustic guitars, and well distorted electric powerchords, Picker has a single-minded vision that brings to mind a subdued rural campfire session with string quartet in tow.

       That vision extends to the core of his songwriting. When All Alone in an Empty House was picked up by the LA-based Anti- label in 2010, and Lost in the Trees began reaching a national and then international audience, Picker was remarkably blunt about the subject of his songs. In interviews, he referred openly to the "extreme loneliness" he'd witnessed him mom, artist Karen Shelton, endure, as well as to "domestic abuse kind of stuff," concluding, "My family is really broken.”

       The tone of that album, somber and weighty but never heavy-handed, carries over to A Church that Fits Our Needs, a plaintive song cycle inspired by passing of Picker's mother, who took her own life three years ago. It begins with "Moment One," a short montage of fractured piano chords punctuated by the crumple of paper and typewriter keystrokes that lead directly into the mechanical, click-clack rhythm track and sharp string bowing that alternate with Picker's softly strummed acoustic guitar and his fragile, unyielding whisper of a falsetto on "Neither Here Nor There." It's an elliptical yet visceral remembrance of things past, a Radiohead-style tone poem that conjures the confusion of loss with crafty allusion in verses like, "Swept up by the sea/Birds fly into my room/When you sat with me/We're neither here nor there."

       The disc carries on in much the same fashion for 12 tracks, including a second sound collage ("Moment Two") that, with little more than footsteps crunching leaves on a walk through the woods, reinforces the contemplative nature of A Church that Fits Our Needs. As he works his way through the various stages of grief, Picker maintains an artful balance between the ebb and flow of mellifluous strings and spare acoustic soundscapes, and deploys the operatic, wordless vocals of Emma Nadeau as a beautifully haunting visage that breezes like the ghost of his mother through tracks like the slowly surging "Red" and the drum-less dreamscape "This Dead Bird Is Beautiful," an eerily airy composition that shares a certain ethereal quality with the productions of Bon Iver. "A golden glow that glowed at night/Don't you say she was weak/I'll carry her/Because she breathed I breathe," he affirms with quiet, Thom Yorke-ian force.

       Like Radiohead and Bon Iver, Lost in the Trees are more about subtle seduction and small, telling details than brash hooks and anthemic choruses. A Church that Fits Our Needs is a sonic sanctuary you go to, not one that comes to you. Once you open the door into Picker's world, it's hard not to marvel at how elegantly he brings country to the conservatory without forcing it, without it ever feeling the least bit contrived, and how gracefully he approaches sadness without succumbing to despair.