Caught in the Carousel

Jane Siberry

With What Shall I Keep Warm
Sheeba

Jane Siberry

Jane Siberry's With What Shall I Keep Warm is such a middle-child of an album, that immediately after its release in early December, Issa announced that after one album (2008's joyous Dragon Dreams) she was returning to being Jane Siberry again. And perhaps that's a reason why this second disc of a planned trilogy seems to lack a cohesive feel. It's so damn full of middle-child teenage angst.

When Siberry is at her best (which thankfully she often is) it's because she is able to tap into the wonderment of childhood or the poetry that makes the despair of adulthood bearable. It's the ages in between that are really a dicey matter. A number of the tracks on this album, "Phoenix Rising," "Eden (Can't Get this Body Right)," and "This is Not the Way," have an aura about them that teenagers seem to love about themselves (and no one else does). They love the anger of being misunderstood, of no one understanding them (even if mostly self-perceived). They are, quite frankly, tremendously tiring sorts. Even the track "Take Me To My Tent," which has all the ingredients of a classic Siberry narrative, replete with charmingly modernizing tales of heroic warriors and battles, falls somehow flat, as if written by a teenage girl only writing the narrative in the hopes that Taylor Lautner might be interested in the film version.

And it is a disappointment that so many of these songs seem to want to fight back at the despair one has looking back on the last ten years, yet they too often don't have the melodic or lyrical language for such a protest. It's as if at a World Court condemnation of a war criminal, the plaintiff, instead of laying forth the case against the defendant, the clear list of the crimes, the murders, etc., simply just approached the defendant and said: "You suck" before storming away to use her cell phone to find out what the flavors were today at the nearby Frozen Yogurt shop.

However, in the iTunes era where the bar seems lowered, gone is the desire for an album to offer at least half of its songs as keepers. My required number now is three. And Siberry, tough gal that she is, gives me only three. "In My Dream," a song that opens with the adult narrator having a winsome dream of running along with her father when he was a boy, is simple and imagistic and moving. "Mama Hereby" is a smart, funny, and sad manifesto to the mother you love but can't seem to get along with. And then there is "Walk On Water," which often sounds as if its melody was discovered hidden in an illuminated manuscript from some medieval royal court. That sense of formality is extended to the lyrics which are unexpectedly, terribly moving: "I was standing at the back of the crowd/At the edge of the sea . . . I prayed that your gaze might fall on me/That my longing might part the sea . . . I walked away from that crowd . . . so absorbed in my own loneliness/Are you not my brother? I guess not yet . . ." and then finally, these devastating lines towards song's end: "I'd give anything to touch your gown/To kiss your hand/Anything/I knelt down in hopelessness/I'd give anything to hear your voice/To wash your feet/Anything/I knelt down in helplessness/and then I felt virtue flow to me."

With What Shall I Keep Warm is such a messy album that one wonders if time might not discover a complete miracle in it (those last lines of "Walk On Water" certainly portend as much). But for now, it might need that younger sibling to come along in a year or so to define it.

—Thomas Cooney