Music, Record Reviews

Let’s Get Nice: Ida, Lovers Prayers

Posted by: Johnny Loftus on February 7, 2008 at 12:00 pm

idaloversprayers.jpg
Ida, Lovers Prayers (Polyvinyl, 2008)

Gentle, sparely beautiful songcraft has been Ida’s specialty for over 15 years now, and Lovers Prayers, the first full-length in three years for cofounders Dan Littleton and Elizabeth Mitchell and their band, is a welcome return to recording. Littleton and Mitchell have never been afraid to slow things way, way down; often, they’ll deconstruct their songs down to the most skeletal of harmonies, or the whisper of a few solitary instruments. Prayers is no different, and that’s just fine. “Surely Gone” begins as midnight feedback from a transistor radio before Mitchell’s voice joins with a piano and tosses the melody back and forth between melancholy and the resonance of hope. It’s a song in search of a circular camera wrap-up scene. “Weight of the Straw” is vintage indie; it would be at home on a compilation from Simple Machines, one of Ida’s old labels. “The Killers,” meanwhile, references the 1964 version of the classic film — name checks go to Lee Marvin and Angie Dickenson — and bounces plot points off what seems like an exploration of a relationship’s end. It’s the kind of sophisticated songwriting that proves again why Ida have so much staying power, despite the overall quietness of their songs and career.

Lovers Prayers doesn’t stop there, and in fact there isn’t a bad song in the bunch. A bit of pedal steel dresses up the second half of “Gravity,” making an already perfectly beautiful song suddenly, almost incredibly even better. The title track builds from its insistent central piano line into a big show for a multi-part harmony, while the crackling electric guitar and mild Americana sway of “See the Stars” suggests Detroit’s Blanche. Mitchell does her best Margo Timmins on “First Time,” and “The Love Below” incorporates the classy growl of a cello and the strum of a strange guitar chord to go with Mitchell’s lower register. She and Littleton were married a few years ago; their daughter must get a kick of telling her friends at school that her parents make the short list of coolest indie rock parents ever. — Johnny Loftus

[tags]Ida, Lovers Prayers, Polyvinyl, Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, Dan Littleton, Elizabeth Mitchell[/tags]

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