Thrill Ride

Tell me again I’m everyone I know I am, Eleni Mandell sings on the mariachi-flavored “Never Know the Party’s Here” from her aptly titled new disc, Thrill. But the singer doesn’t need a suitor — or the rock press, which has been wildly supportive of Mandell — to reassure her that her two albums capture a remarkable variance of personae without sacrificing musical cohesion. Mandell has the slink of Polly Jean Harvey and the sulk of Fiona Apple, and she sounds eerily like both at times, but neither comparison does justice to the uncanny theatricality of Thrill.

“Pauline” sets the stage when Mandell plunges a dagger into the title character with a play-by-play detailing the seduction of the man they share: Smells like a magazine, tastes like a watermelon/Looks like, looks like, looks like/You’ve got a problem. By the next song, “He Thinks He’s in Love,” Mandell herself is deluded and betrayed. Complementary themes aside, though, the opening one-two punch of Thrill is noteworthy for its Tom Waits-meets-Morphine, wet-street-during-a-blackout exotic minimalism.

Not coincidentally, Waits is Mandell’s biggest influence. Waits, an old hand at making music from within a carefully built persona (the ultimate beautiful loser — part Kurt Weill, part street urchin), even encouraged Mandell when she debuted her first batch of songs almost 10 years ago. The two were introduced by Chuck E. Weiss, who turned a chance meeting with Mandell into an audition for underground sponsorship. Mandell’s original songs dazzled both men.

Of course, around that time the bottom dropped out of the singer-songwriter market, and years of waitressing and busing tables ensued for Mandell. (It’s a profession to which the UC-Berkeley grad returns when not on tour.)

“I have always had music in my life,” she says from a tour stop in Ottawa, Canada. “I played the piano and violin but never had the discipline to practice much. I picked up the guitar at 15 and started performing at 20 or 21. I think it was Chuck (Weiss) who said it might take me 10 years, which I remember thinking was insane. But over the years, I’ve thought long and hard about what else I could possibly do, and I didn’t come up with anything but this.”

Mandell steeled herself against what she says was an unbroken series of rejections. At 31, she has weathered the stalled wooing of a then-upstart Dreamworks label, a string of “terrible boyfriends who have become very supportive friends,” and her first blizzard. The last occurred two weeks ago when the native Angeleno and her tour manager hit a typically early Canadian snowstorm during a long drive.

“Neither of us had ever driven through snow,” Mandell says. “At one point, we pulled over and asked the guy behind us how we were driving. We spun out a couple of times.”

Mandell was racing to make an in-store appearance in Minneapolis, the kind of low-wattage gig that nevertheless is crucial to building a national fanbase. Mandell played that day, as she has done for all her shows outside Los Angeles so far, alone with a guitar. “It’s the best way to get good at what you’re doing. And if I’m a fan of someone’s music, I’d be thrilled to see them perform that way. I’d love to be able to bring a band, but there’s no money for one,” Mandell says.

At the Los Angeles release party for Thrill, some of the musicians who add sepia and gray to Mandell’s noirish songs turned up on a volunteer basis, which flattered her. “It’s really difficult,” she says. “Danny Frankel, the drummer, played for Fiona Apple and got paid a lot less to play for me, I’m sure.

“It is embarrassing sending off a tape of yourself to musicians you don’t know to ask them to play with you,” Mandell admits. “But Danny called me up a week before the sessions and was excited. I’m a solo artist, so I’m really sensitive so far. I feel kind of like when someone agrees to play with me, they’re doing me a favor.”

The key to Thrill‘s claustrophobic sexiness, Mandell suggests, is the interplay between Frankel’s drums and Sheldon Gomberg’s upright bass. And she’s right; it’s mesmerizing. (The Waits-inflected marimbas and clopping percussion help too.) But Mandell’s writing and performance are equally, insistently hypnotic. Adding outrageously lusty giggles to “Taking You Out” and a chorus of rising oh oh ohs that stays just this side of 900-number prurience, Mandell’s delivery is stunningly assured. “I felt like I’d graduated to another level for this record,” Mandell says. “I get excited, not nervous, to go into the studio.”

Mandell, whose degree is in fine art, designed the striking cover of Thrill, doing most of the letter-cutting for the collage herself. She was inspired by European advertising posters of the 1920s and ’30s, which in turn had taken American art deco to heart.

“I’m a very nostalgic person,” says Mandell, who’s not referring to the ’80s. “I’m drawn to older things. I like making posters out of paste and glue and paper. Just like not making music with computers, for me, it’s about not making art with computers.”

That well-informed nostalgia has at its root a set of relationships Mandell jokes is the most obvious symbol of uncool: family groupies. “My family is ridiculously supportive,” Mandell says. She has earned part of her living thanks to cable reruns of one- and two-star movies that buried her songs somewhere in the action; she hasn’t seen any of them, but her family watches them with the fervor of gathered X-Files geeks. “I was playing this dumpy coffee shop, and I told my parents not to bring any friends or relatives. But my grandmother showed up, and when I asked her what she thought she was doing, she said, ‘Well, your mother told me no old people, so I came.'” Thrill is dedicated to one grandmother and was made in memory of the other.

Noticeably absent from Thrill‘s simple album notes is any mush directed at a man in her life. “1970 Red Chevelle,” in fact, is a kiss-off to a lover Mandell says was “obsessed with making money. He was the ultimate hustler. He could turn water into money. I lived with him, and he would buy property and cars and sell them for a profit, and he’d bring these weird people into my house to make deals. One guy offered me money for this enormous tube radio that belonged to my grandmother. I would never get rid of it, ever, and he was telling me I should have sold it.

“I think I probably do have at least one song for each, you know, big boyfriend I’ve had, and a couple for the smaller ones.” (Coming from the author of the taunt Action is action, don’t you want to get some?, the phrase “smaller ones” has a wince-inducing sting.) “Four of them were at my record release party,” Mandell adds.

Mandell already has her third album planned and mostly written. (Some new songs are in her open-ended set, for which Mandell doesn’t use a list.) After that, she intends to cut an album of country covers. “I love George Jones and Tammy Wynette’s duets,” she says. “That’s all I’ve been listening to lately. I think it would be interesting to see what some of those songs would sound like if I use the same musicians.” With or without a band, though, Mandell writes and sounds like no one but herself.