Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions
The drizzly season calls for dark tones. If golden-voiced Hope Sandoval does one thing exquisitely — and she does — it’s make perfect rainy-day music. Rarely is a song sad enough to make listeners feel genuinely concerned about the singer, but the first solo album from the former Mazzy Star vocalist does just that, again and again, veritably begging for intervention.
Leonard Cohen is an obvious influence, but while his “Suzanne” was about the lure of a sad and crazy girl, Sandoval’s song by the same title, which pairs its lovely acoustic swirl with scattered, cryptic lyrics, is in itself sad and crazy. “Charlotte,” another wan character portrait, contains lines such as Gonna teach her to steal/’Cause I know how she feels/Livin’ on the wrong side of the tracks/And you know she’s never comin’ back. The title track, a minute and twenty seconds of oscillating organ sounds, seems like another warning sign.
Anyone who remembers its dark-horse 1994 radio hit, “Fade Into You,” knows that Mazzy Star could be brilliant. But too many tunes from the band’s three albums didn’t quite jell, with Sandoval’s improvised beatnik poetry and guitarist David Roback’s dank instrumentals competing to sound mysterious. On the quiet, seamless Bavarian Fruit Bread, Sandoval sounds more like she’s singing for herself than for some secret contingent of psychedelic noir cowboys. “Butterfly Morning” has one of the softest, sweetest vocal deliveries since Joni Mitchell had all her estrogen. But where on She Hangs Brightly, Mazzy Star’s 1990 debut, Sandoval had the crackle of Emmylou Harris to balance her delicacy, she now more often sounds like Harris after downing a whole bottle of port … or is that something more serious in her veins?
Such is the power of the chanteuse, from Billie Holiday to Chrissie Hynde, to make listeners fall in love with her. And Sandoval, unlike the divas who rub their asses all over MTV, can actually seduce. But though Bavarian Fruit Bread is gorgeous, it’s too foggy and lonely to inspire — and under cloudy skies, it might be a little too much.
