Dark Smaland

Recorded between Athens and Brooklyn over the past year with essentially two different bands, Dark Smland nevertheless finds a collaborative songwriterly fulcrum in the trio of McIntosh, drummer Eric Harris, and guitarist Derek Almstead, who engineered a great deal of the album's foundational tracks at his own Pixel Studios. Indigenously Athenian-seeming in it's broad scope of instrumentation, the record features contributions from a host of E6 stalwarts, including Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel and Will Cullen Hart, John Fernandes and Peter Erchick, all of whom partnered with Harris in the Olivia Tremor Control. Truly, these visionaries' offerings color Dark Smland wonderfully, but the primary emotional impact of this record hinges fully on the edifying low-end plaint of Heather's brooding cello. Just as Charlie Mingus flipped the script in jazz and made his bass the driver of his genius sensibility, Heather constructs an unlikely and wholly rewarding pop aesthetic with her atypical primary axe. And her bucolic, imagistic lyrics work perfectly within the boundless and sonorous sonic vista she creates in her Dark Smland; as close as this record sometimes feels to a dark night of the soul, it leaves a listener hopeful and bright and willing to return.