Alicia Wiley steps out with Both Sides

I love abstract art. But like all true love, it's conditional. Paint a single orange dot in the corner of a 12-foot blank canvas? Stupendous. Glue a bunch of Kleenex boxes to an old refrigerator? Riveting.

I find that I apply a similar artistic litmus test to musicians. Create whatever atmospheric, dissonant sounds you like with your instruments (seriously, please do!), but for the love of god have the ability to actually play, and more importantly an understanding of what you're playing and what makes it all come together.

Which is why I find Alicia Wiley so impressive.

The fifth album by this 28-year-old Minneapolis-based singer-songwriter, Both Sides, is a haunting, moody soundscape of airy piano-based pop. It's not in the least bit jazzy to my ears, but that is precisely the foundation Wiley works from. She holds a degree in jazz piano, and her earliest albums were heavily jazz-influenced. Both Sides represents a musical evolution that is both bold and admirable, and she pulls it off without a hint of clumsiness or cliché.

With her breathy-bordering-on-sultry vocals, Wiley both seduces and mystifies, channeling such influences as Mazzy Star and Sarah McLaughlin. On Both Sides, she deftly creates a sparse, not quite melancholy world, like a still winter day when your breath lingers over a crystalline landscape. Nothing is rushed. All is contemplation. And it feels incredibly cathartic.

"It's a romance scenario of chasing the idea of someone you can't have, being blinded by both sides and not seeing what's really there," Wiley says of the album title. "It's a dark mood and haunting, but it's not a negative album by any means. It's mysterious. The stories aren't always obvious. I leave a lot to interpretation."

That lack of literalness is what gives Both Sides its depth and maturity. The album cover itself alludes to the brooding mystery that lies within. Wiley, looking stunningly delicate in a black gown that highlights her porcelain skin, sits on a decaying wooden walkway (located outside Pachyderm Studio) while a barely discernible dark figure lurks in the woods behind her. It's subtle, devoid of obvious explanation...and delightfully unnerving.

That unsettled theme is carried throughout the album, such as on the ethereal "Fire," a particularly intimate and spacious song on an already decidedly meditative album. Wiley is at her most sensually mystical when she sings "The devil/He's loose/But you're the king/Branching out and over everything/Everything/Why are we always on fire?" What is she trying to get across with those words? I have no idea, nor do I want to know. Developing your own interpretation is the reward, and Wiley provides the richest of ingredients.

"Jake Hanson [who plays guitar on the album] was really able to shine with the more haunting sounds. I love experimenting with new sounds. I never want to feel like I'm not moving forward and exploring and searching," Wiley says. "I really do have a lot of love for many genres. I draw from different styles and I don't keep myself in any box when it comes to what I feed from or what I respect. I'm able to appreciate almost any genre."

Toward the end of our conversation, although I had already made up my mind, I ask Wiley: "Would you say you are an introvert?" Looking demure and fragile in the booth across from me at the Caffetto coffee shop in Uptown, she leans over the table and aggressively whispers, "Absolutely."

Hardly necessary. It was a rhetorical question. Having spent the last half hour speaking with (and frankly straining to hear) this charmingly nervous and shy woman, it was abundantly clear that Wiley is the type of person who relishes retreating into herself, plumbing the bottomless complexity of human emotion, surfacing what she finds through her piano and her voice.

"I just really enjoy the process and the search," she says. "It's almost a spiritual thing for me."

The section in music labeled “female vocalist” is a crowded one.  It’s difficult for any artist to escape sound-alike comparisons, but independent female artists in particular can’t seem to avoid the one-dimensional critical labels that seek to define a certain set of characteristics in every woman who sings into a microphone or puts her fingers to a fret board.  Maybe it makes for tidier copy.  Maybe it’s just an easy way to get publicity.  It certainly is a good way to begin a paragraph.

So let’s just get this out of the way, shall we?  On her new album Both Sides, Minneapolis’ Alicia Wiley channels some of the oddity of Fiona Apple with the smooth vocal delivery of Sade to create a simmering, seething, unsettling collection of tunes that are often remindful of Cat Power’s better work.  Oh, and, uh, Neko Case, Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Feist, and Alanis Morisette.  Phew, is that everyone?

In truth, Both Sides is simmering and seething and unsettling, and, yes, various smoky and brooding influences abound.  But Wiley has built enough local credibility for listeners to know her voice, and on this record, she employs a who’s who of Minneapolis backing musicians to push the music supporting that voice into signifier-defying areas of subtle detail.    

In other words, Alicia Wiley’s name is on it, but this is a record about a band bringing their trademark weaponry together to create something a little bit different.  Listen for the corners here.  Everyone is playing a part.  Journeyman guitarist Jake Hanson lends eerie ornamentation to songs like “Goldmine,” “Beautiful Surprise,” and “Half Gone”—songs which already sway and punch to the twin rhythms of Luke Anderson and J.T. Bates and the simmering bass of James Buckley.  “Sick” is a good epithet for this rhythm section.

Two major highlights for the full band effect are the tracks that form the center of the album, “Half Gone” and “Floodgates.”  “Half Gone” coasts on slow tribal drums, Wiley’s voice curling like smoke over a bed of Rhodes while Hanson’s guitar flashes and flutters in the ether (listen also for his quiet walls of feedback).  “This love is rare/this love is wild” Wiley sings, and you start to believe the rare part.  “Floodgates” sounds like something that could have appeared on a mid-period Radiohead album, if Radiohead had ever loved a blues stomp.  Major-to-minor piano changes form the center, but Hanson’s guitar sits behind everything, expanding into and out of ambient textures with Greenwood-esque aplomb.  The rhythm section keeps things propulsive, Buckley’s bass ambling up and down through its dark under bed.

Oh, yeah, and then there’s Wiley herself.  Much of this album is about love, but it’s the music that dictates exactly what kind of love.  Much of Wiley’s lyrics here deal with obsession and not being able to let go, dark enough territory for any songwriter to mine.  But in true Yorkean tradition, Wiley doesn’t necessarily give the listener the expected musical accompaniment, as on “Undercover,” where dreamy piano atmospherics support lyrics about fearful and tentative love.

The thing that’s most heartening about Both Sides is that it’s an album that’s good completely on its own terms.  It’s a rare musical treat for disparate talents to come together and create something special, something that can only be referred to with vague precedents.  Impeccably produced by Paul Marino, this is an album that will play even better live, when the players will really be able to flex their muscles.  And, yes, you might hear a little bit of Fiona Apple, et. al., there as well.  But mostly you’ll hear Alicia Wiley.     

See Alicia perform live at the Both Sides CD release show this Thursday, 8:00 PM, at the 7^th Street Entry.             

- The Golden Age is a weekly column written by Erik Martz from Minneapolis, Minnesota.