Photo by Joe Kirschling
Marielle Allschwang can’t pinpoint exactly why it took her so long to record her first solo album. It’s not that she was at a loss for songs. A few numbers from her debut record, Dead Not Done, released this week on Gloss Records, date back as far as seven years, and some of them she recorded about a half decade ago on a long-lost demo. “That tape is probably ashes by now,” Allschwang says. “I don’t know what it was—shyness or fear, or not being completely satisfied with the sound of it, knowing that there was still work to be done. I guess I didn’t want to release it until I was feeling really good about the end product.”
In the years since misplacing those demos, Allschwang kept plenty busy, staking out a home right in the center of the city’s experimental rock scene as a member of the art-rock orchestra Group of the Altos and as one fourth of the doom-folk quartet Hello Death, in addition to moonlighting with projects like Death Blues. And between those gigs, she played solo shows, demonstrating her remarkable ability to silence a room with nothing more than her saintly voice and some economical guitar strums.
Recorded at a barn in Cedarburg with some assistance from many of her Altos bandmates, Dead Not Done demonstrates just how scalable Allschwang’s intimate songs about endings, loss and rebirths are. She had assumed the sessions would more or less reflect the naked simplicity of her solo shows—“I was going to get in and record a pretty sparse version of things with bass and drums and maybe a few other touches,” she says—but quickly saw that her bandmates had bigger ideas.
“I remember us loading out equipment and they just had piles of horns and all these other instruments,” she says. “So I just went with it. I guess I’d gotten over a lot of anxiety and trusted the process. And I’m glad I did because the album is a testament to the people who were involved and the really beautiful ideas they brought to the recording process. I guess a part of the direction was just embracing these really harebrained ideas, so it’s kind of a time capsule in a way.”
Their touches are all over the record, morphing and modifying songs that, in their most naked form, could pass as Appalachian folk traditionals. On “Aquarium,” horns and woodwinds adorn her in a sort of post-rock update of a 1940s big-band arrangements. The album’s most electronic number, “Farmer” builds from a tape loop to a cacophony of buzzing guitars, pummeled drums and Auto-Tuned pleas, while “Your Mother” finishes with a woozy men’s choir. “We were all open to new tones or new punctuations,” Allschwang says. “People were picking up objects that I didn’t even know could make a sound.”
Yet even with all those accents and additions, the album is never busy or cluttered. At its core it is what Allschwang set out for it to be, a faithful representation of her songs that mostly puts her voice and her guitar front and center.
“It really helps that I know the people who played on this record pretty well, and we’ve been working together in so many different contexts that they had an understanding of what kind of sensibility and feel I wanted,” Allschwang says. “They contributed a lot, but I felt really assured about knowing when things felt like too much, or when ideas weren’t right for the songs, so I don’t think I ever lost control of what I wanted the album to be.
“Part of what’s been moving the last couple of months, just as I’ve been talking more about the record, is I’ve had the opportunity to reflect on the incredible people I’ve met,” she continues. “This record would have felt really different without some of the opportunities I’ve had. I could have recorded and released some of these songs years ago, but it wouldn’t have been the same.”
Marielle Allschwang plays an album release show on Saturday, Aug. 15 at Company Brewing at 10 p.m. with Spirit Writing.
"Drifting" by Marielle Allschwang from Sean Williamson on Vimeo.
