#Shana Cleveland

[girlzguitarz]

[leatherpearlslace]

[sinceileftyoublog]

Shana Cleveland Live Show Review: 4/27, Old Town School of Folk Music, Chicago

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Thursday night at Old Town School of Folk Music, Shana Cleveland and her band brought Manzanita (Hardly Art) to life. As promised, Luke Bergman and Will Sprott’s respective pedal steel and synth playing provided a “thick eeriness.” They contrasted the tactility of Cleveland’s plucked guitars, whether Cleveland’s picking was by itself introducing a song or playing an interlude, or hovering atop the textural, foggy hum of the backing band. Drummer Geneva Harrison provided thumping fills on “Faces in the Firelight”, pounding might on “Walking Trough Morning Dew”, and subtle brushwork almost everywhere. Her shaking percussion on songs like “Mystic Mine” emulated the creepy naturalism that inspires so much of Manzanita. At the center and barely in front was Cleveland’s effortless voice, sandwiched in timbre among the instruments, telling the stories that contextualize the songs’ instrumental vignettes.

Though the lines between La Luz and Cleveland’s solo work are, according to Cleveland herself, certainly blurring a bit, she has very much refined a solo artistic voice. A song such as Night of the Worm Moon’s country ballad “I’ll Never Know” was purportedly originally written for La Luz but “didn’t make sense” for the band; you can hear its siblings in the “Paint It Black” guitars of “Night of the Worm Moon” and Spaghetti Western aesthetic of “Face of the Sun”. Manzanita’s songs have doubled down on Cleveland’s pseudo cinematic vibe, from the whistling pedal steel of “Mystic Mine” to Richard Brautigan tribute “Mayonnaise”. When performing the latter, as she sang the line, “I’ll write a thousand songs before I’m done,” Cleveland mimicked a slit throat, the type of darkly humorous and strange mood that oozes from Manzanita just as much as the instruments themselves. If those thousand songs continue to reflect Cleveland’s ever-shifting perspectives and sense of self, we’re in for a treat, sonic and literary.

[mhisadj]

Shana Cleveland - Faces in the Firelight 

Off of Manzanita.

There’s something dreamy and spacious going on here and I dig it.

[different-sound-hemispheres]

I was really impressed by Shana Cleveland’s first single off of her upcoming album, “Manzanita”. “Faces in the Fireflight” is incredibly lush and airy, lofting the listener up to angelic heights with both the string arrangements, soft vocals, and subdued drums. Everything is used sparingly and only used to hit emotional resonance when needed. The strings will all the sudden leap up at you and wash you away inside the song. “Faces in the Fireflight” sounds like an innovative, avant-garde track made circa, say, 1966. It takes you to a place that seems like the past but a place completely new at the same time. Something familiar but foreign—otherworldly almost. In other words, it’s fresh! Give it a listen above.

[prideandperdition]

Days and nights of dragging through the mud

It seems you're always waitin' on the sun

[spilladabalia]

La Luz - Strange World

[girlzguitarz]

[leatherpearlslace]

[sinceileftyoublog]

Shana Cleveland Album Review: Manzanita

(Hardly Art)

BY JORDAN MAINZER

On “Mystic Mine”, the whistling psychedelic folk tune from her third album Manzanita, Shana Cleveland sings, “I feel so relieved to be back in the country,” the last four words delivered in harmony with electric piano and whizzing synths. The singer-songwriter’s music has often occupied this reflective mood, whether embedded in the garage pop of La Luz or the abstract pastoral nature of her solo records. Yet, as they say, this time, it’s personal. The songs on Manzanita were written during the sort of major life changes many songwriters metaphorically describe as a move: relocating to rural California, and becoming pregnant with and giving birth to her first child. In a sense, many aspects of the album are literal, from the album title’s namesake California-endemic evergreen tree to references to the exploited natural areas and their resulting ghost towns. Moreover, Cleveland grounds you in the audible scrapes and squeaks of her close-miked fingerpicked guitar, getting you lost in the earthly sounds of fingers hitting strings at different angles. Still, Manzanita is a self-described “supernatural love album,” rich, lush, and as unmistakably strange as the country itself.

Many of the songs on Manzanita see Cleveland finding commonality between her own pregnancy and childbirth and her surroundings. Metaphysical opener “The Ghost” was inspired by her realization that pregnancy is a “psychedelic experience;” atop a Mellotron and acoustic guitar sway, she sings, “When you wake up in the night, I’m lying next to you / Can I come through?” She could be singing to her child in utero, or her life partner Will Sprott, who plays keyboards, dulcimer, glockenspiel, harpsichord, and synth on the record. “Faces in the Firelight” is addressed to both of them, its genesis a moment where Cleveland was watching Sprott tend to a burn pile in the distance and thinking he looked like the image of her ultrasound. Lilting guitars, crisp, relaxed drums, and golden hour synths soundtrack the multi-faceted question that buoys Manzanita: “Do you love me like I do you?” Her pause before “you” suggests Cleveland also recognizes the importance of self-love, as someone about to undergo a major life change, needing to balance her needs with her devotion to her family. And the shaky “Babe” revels in the strangeness of it all. When Cleveland sings, “Look at that beautiful babe,” the song breaks from its shuffle and atonally tiptoes to an off-kilter melody, calling back to the idea that being pregnant is psychedelic, indeed.

Yet, Manzanita is also an album of contrasts, Cleveland admitting that she’s imperfect, and so is the the living, breathing country. On “Gold Tower”, accompanied by Olie Eshleman’s melancholy pedal steel, she feels, and wants to give only. “If I let you down, bury me in the ground,” she sings, continuing, “I want to be yours totally.” Meanwhile, the presence fire does not always symbolize the ember of possibility. The minute-and-a-half spoken word track “Ten Hour Drive Through West Coast Disaster”, with its descriptions of “Cattle farms out of horror films” and “flames and fire planes” gives Cleveland doubts as a person and a parent. “Will you find a way to love this world?” she asks. The beauty of her fingerpicked guitar on “Quick Winter Sun” and “Sheriff of the Salton Sea”, recalling the likes of Jansch and Basho, is subsumed by the cloud of instrumentation beneath. Final track “Walking Through Morning Dew” describes spring bloom as not a picturesque view to fawn over but a time when the bugs come inside. “The wasps are crawling in our rooms,” Cleveland sings over instrumentation that sounds like your ear’s up to their hive. It’s a fitting end to an album that peels back the layers of life and travel experiences that some will tell you are nothing but idyllic. Manzanita knows better.

[yucca-valley]

Dans les oreilles en ce moment :

Lael Neale - White T-Shirt

Joanna Sternberg - People Are Toys to You

Anna St Louis - Morning

Julie Byrne - Summer Glass

Cory Hanson - Twins

PJ Harvey - Snake

Shana Cleveland - Ten Hour Drive Through West Coast Disaster

Blonde Redhead - Snowman

Image : Sweetie de Jane Campion