Little Scream - The Golden Record (2011)

Montreal-based singer-songwriter Laurel Sprengelmeyer, recording with members of Arcade Fire and the National, steps out with an assured debut.

"Oh, I don't know who I am, and I don't know what I'll be," coos Laurel Sprengelmeyer of Little Scream, above acoustic guitars that run like rivulets. Sprengelmeyer sings her self-doubt at the start of the second verse of "The Heron and the Fox", the quietly reflective, sadly nostalgic centerpiece of her stellar debut, The Golden Record. An Iowa native now living in Montreal and recording there with members of Arcade Fire, the National, and A Silver Mt. Zion, Sprengelmeyer sounds both worn from experience and inspired by something she can't yet imagine, the peripatetic sort who's old enough to be wise but young enough to be adventurous. That's the great thread that runs through this album, a perfectly mixed bag of graceful folk, coiled pop, and expansive art rock. Lyrically, Sprengelmeyer seems to yearn for the past; stylistically, though, she presses for a bold polyglot future of twisted contexts. Here, she gets both.

It'd be easy to separate The Golden Record's 10 songs into a few orders: There are the mostly still drifters, like the gently swollen "Black Cloud" and the reverb-washed break-up of "People is Place". There are songs that rock and lurch, like the violin-trilling stomp "Boatman" and the snarling-and-smiling "Cannons". There are those experiments, like "Guyegaros", that fit neither. Segregating the songs, though, means selling Sprengelmeyer short as some manic amateur unable to unify or control her ideas. But most every move she makes as Little Scream is a good one: "Cannons" is as incisive and propulsive as the best of St. Vincent, an oft-occurring but fairly inadequate comparison. She sculpts guitar noise and synthesizer squiggles into a perfectly odd pop song that's as aggressive as it is endearing. The same goes for "Red Hunting Jacket", a somehow cheerful cavalcade of handclaps and guitar abrasion punctuated by a vamp of boogie-woogie piano and spiraling flute lines. The song itself is an excavation of forgotten memories from a relationship built on the run-- "What can we communicate that won't just turn to dust?" Sprengelmeyer sings, her band twisting deliriously beneath. A kick drum thunders through a scrim of noise and samples at the start of "Your Radio". It's the resolute beginning to a charged electric track that eventually rises to arena sizes, with tiered harmonies and a band whose trust in repetition pays off in a coda that suggests the Dead C scoring a battlefield scene. She brings the same sort of control to "People Is Place", one of those gentle tracks that builds over its four minutes to a gorgeous instrumental groan, glowing long tones breaking against a piano like waves against a shoreline. Each look is as convincing as the next.

The Golden Record is a wide-open exploration of Sprengelmeyer's sensibilities, the introduction on which she's able to explore both her most spare and extravagantly orchestrated impulses. It's easy to imagine a scenario where, after a year or two of touring these songs, watching audiences respond, and feeling herself grow tired of certain tracks and maybe not others, Sprengelmeyer circumscribes herself as a writer, favoring a handful of styles versus the horde she delivers here. That's not necessarily a bad thing, either, as every approach sounds assured and evolved. There's no stylistic filler, no dilettante drivel badly in need of an editor. An album of Sprengelmeyer's quiet songs would be as welcome as a full-length of her quakes. For the time being, though, The Golden Record is the document of a real-life wanderer who sings about drift and regret, dreams and reality, in songs that know enough not to sit still. The Golden Record is an infinitely approachable and enjoyable welcome by an artist who sounds like she's here now, for the duration.