Telenovela

Saffron Songs

Le Man-Ape Recordings

originally published April 25, 2007

At first, Telenovela's full-length debut Saffron Songs seems like a small album. There are lots of little sounds mixed with lots of little samples, and the vocals - declamatory if they're Zachary Smola's, smoky and murmured and sweet if they're Stephanie Clayton's - hide behind, obscured by mixing and the accumulated weight of appropriated music. There are no epics, no big rock-outs, no particular swoons or screams or even slumps. There are bossa novas and folk-rockers and sleepy ballads. The first song is called "Paint it Beige."

Listen closer, though, and you discover all that smallness is in service of a big subject: magic. Now, this sounds awfully twee (and it is a little twee), but, to be more specific, it's about the lack of actual magic in the world, and how we deal with that; how we resolve the free-floating contents of our heads with the banal realities at hand. And this is a big subject, since, as someone or other once said, art is magic. It has no discernible purpose, and yet we continue to produce and consume it, because it does have an effect on us. Why? How? Who knows? Magic? Maybe. But that book is still heavy, that show is still crowded and hot, those bills still need to be paid, and though love is nebulous and strange, it can also get your ass arrested.

In "Crazy Love," maracas shake, acoustic guitars pluck, and analog tones decay slowly, while Clayton and Smola sing, "It's a treasure that's easy to find / dust it off, it's the last of its kind / it's a dream that's impossible / magic comes, magic goes / life goes on, I suppose / Give me that crazy love…" It's that "I suppose" that really kills as an evocation of love's shared (and wonderful) psychosis, the denial of the impossible until it, maybe, becomes true. Again and again, the album describes a fantasy, then tears it down, only to grant its possible incarnation elsewhere. On the best song, "Breakfast With Birds," Clayton repeatedly attempts to enact the magical, but each time falls sick, and this rebuke of the body can only be cured, she continues to insist, by the object of affection to whom the song addresses itself ("turns out I just need you"). But even this object is unspecified and distant, a possible cure but one she would prefer to keep unrealized, so that it might persist as a potential cure-all rather than become yet another problem.Saffron Songs is a beautiful album, and, like its nearest musical antecedents (Stereolab, Stephin Merritt) it's wonderful enough in the background, but closely attended, it's illuminating and complex. On "Surrogate Magic," they sing: "Jesus God, oh can't you give / a standing for a will to live / substitute reason to rise through the day / surrogate magic tries to take you away." There's no resolution here, but in that tension, there is something indescribable, and on this album, there's something really wonderful.

Michael Barthel

Telenovela is playing at the Caledonia Lounge on Saturday, May 5.