hem - funnel cloud

.:: Hem's third studio album, Funnel Cloud , features songs of such carefully crafted, dream-like beauty that it's almost impossible to place exactly where they've come from or even in what era they might have been recorded. You can hear a subtle country twang, the storytelling simplicity of great folk music, a touch of Tin Pan Alley sophistication.

They at times recall the emotionally stirring sweep of movie music from an age when the best pictures were shot in Cinemascope and orchestras crowded onto sound stages to perform the scores. These tunes are so immediately involving, sometimes so soothingly familiar, that you'll insist you know them - and love them - already. Hem exists very much in the here and now, but always manages to evoke the timeless.

Funnel Cloud is Hem's most lushly orchestrated work, yet it's also the group's most pop-oriented effort. The immediate standout is "Not California," a compelling tale of displaced lovers that was already featured earlier this year on NPR's All Songs Considered . Heart-tugging verses glide into an instantly memorable chorus, and it all builds to a gorgeous, string-laden finale.

"Too Late To Turn Back Now" has an early-seventies country-rock feel; its background strings recall the brilliant charts that legendary arranger Paul Buckmaster created for Tumbleweed Connection-period Elton John. "The Pills Stopped Working" is a mid-album showstopper, a rollicking number featuring honky-tonk piano, wailing harmonica, gospel-like vocal harmonies from guest singers Amy Helm of Ollabelle and former Smashing Pumpkin James Iha, and a soaring horn section. Says Ellyson, "We're experimenting and having fun and you can hear that on the record."

The majority of material on Funnel Cloud moves at an elegant slow-dance tempo, all of it held together by Ellyson's miraculous voice. She has the pristine, comforting quality of a singer from a classic animated Disney movie, yet the stories she tells can be as disquieting as David Lynch's Blue Velvet , in which unimaginable dangers lurk behind a bright, primary-color façade.

For example, over the subtly portentous arrangement of the title track, Ellyson gently describes the moment before a pastoral scene is obliterated by a tornado: "Over the horizon, the same thing every day/Until a painted backdrop rises up and blows a world away."

download: hem - funnel cloud

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