Glass, by Nora Stanley
For Nora Stanley—a talented accompanist for and collaborator with Beth Orton, the New Pornographers, and fellow conservatory-trained composer and musician Benny Bock—Glass is more a surreptitious slide onto center stage than a bold stride toward it.
It is nevertheless subtly authoritative: Stanley plays several instruments, including piano, guitar, clarinet, flute, and saxophone, but with intentions aimed at tone and atmosphere instead of technique and virtuosity.
Her approach is reminiscent of the slow, introspective experimentation that Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon allowed to flow through his Volcano Choir side project. She and co-producer Nate Mendelsohn, whose own credits include a slew of other indie musicians like Sam Evian and Caroline Says, carefully determine how many layers and effects each track needs.
“Geography Lessons,” for example, moves primarily on an acoustic-guitar folk pattern, recorded closely enough to take in fingers shifting on frets, while swelling woodwinds and stark piano ripple outward from that pattern like concentric-circle waves from raindrops in a pond.
“St. Elmo’s Fire” starts with relatively conventional alt-rock electric guitar, crunchy and dirty as classic Breeders, plus bass and drums as steady as Paul and Ringo, and then a long passage that turns toward alt-country prettiness and hidden thoughts before returning to the crunch and drifting to a close.
In “Bonsai,” the drift is at the beginning, a series of atonally chiming strummed chords and a breezy flurry of saxophone notes that seem to vanish while Stanley eases into enunciating the first verse, after which several of the instruments she can play drop in and out of the track while the music braids classical, jazz, and rock elements into a fascinating swirl.
Amid all this, Stanley’s voice is, like Suzanne Vegas’s or Aimee Mann’s, shyly tuneful. Or perhaps coy: her soft invitation for the listener’s own surreptitious slide into Glass.
