As I wrote to a friend after finishing my first spin on this: “What the world needs now is more warped master statements!” And to think I almost didn’t spin it once after reading the lyrics in the booklet. Never read before spinning. Even I forget that rule sometimes.
Simply reading, you see, you might think Jane Siberry simply wants to praise the good and assail the bad. Terribly shortsighted because printed lyrics can’t incorporate the music.
The first song is called “Eden (can’t get this body thing right”) and you’d learn from the lyrics that she conflates body-image/diet anxiety with the rap the title character took from the rest of the world, then rips up that whole swirled dichotomy for a vision of the future including everything, or at least everything worth having plus a few Eden-necessitated evils. What you won’t learn from the lyrics is how she fires off a different rhythmic cadence for almost every line, pits herself counting polyrhythms against a smooth basso ostinato, then “love” conquers in a magnificent melisma, everything else fallen away. And that’s only the first 3:28.
“This Is Not The Way” fills with the ills of the world, which you can probably guess, but delivered in short, sharp indictments and bursts of concern from what sounds like a small village of voices. Siberry shoos everybody out save a lone oboe (“In My Dream”) and builds a bridge to troubled youth in “Phoenix.” She’s got more stones than me. Not only do the youth I run into on the bus every day seem impossibly self-absorbed, I doubt I can ever think otherwise.
But I think about the problem instead of ignoring it. And so maybe “warped” as I called it, really means a perspective for which we all need to twist.
– Andrew Hamlin
