Cabin Project's Unfolded and Soft Melancholy

When I was sixteen, I had a feeling that I still distinctly remember. I was lying on my bed in the basement and I felt a certain kind of soft melancholy. Naturally, I wanted to match music to my emotion, so I took a mental inventory to see which album I should put on. Nothing fit. Grunge was too harsh for the feeling, anything from the 80s was too brash, post grunge was too quirky. I tried playing my parents' Enya CD, but that didn't work either. I had to think of what I did not have in my collection and it finally dawned on me: emotional, poetic, feminine music. The closest thing I had to that was Elastica which was loud, brash, and snarling.

I didn't find the musical fit to my soft melancholy that day. But some months later, I found it. In the pre-internet days, a vital part of my musical education was the CD and cassette collection in the bowels of the Orem Public Library. So, somewhere along the way while browsing through the Smithereens, early OMD, Joy Division, early New Order, Icehouse, Asia, Oingo Boingo, Aerosmith, etc, I came across Sarah McLachlan's debut album, Touch. And there it was. The answer to the void in my collection. (Further exploration yielded her sophomore album Solace as being even better. The next two albums don't have quite the same impact for me.)

Touch and Solace-era Sarah M. was the starting point for me when listening to the album. The sound of the vocals in the chorus of "Where I Stand" for example, could be from Solace. There is also some late-1990s Heather Nova in the feeling of some of the vocals. But there is one thing that strikes me about the vocals that is very different for me compared to Sarah and Heather: The first few listens, I cannot make out a lot of what is being said so the voice works as an instrument in coloring the sound of the album. That voice! It hovers high, it goes low, it's soft, it hardens up, it conveys so much emotion and yet I cannot tell you a single thing that it says.

Although the voice is the starting point, the viola is what really drives the album. The long drawn out notes of sadness or driving the tempo with short staccato strokes. Because the viola is used so liberally in the early tracks and to such great effect, I thirst for it in the remainder of the album when the viola isn't featured prominently at the beginning of some of the later tracks. I wait eagerly. I know it’s coming. You don’t let a PhD in viola not get in on the action on every song. For example, in the song Highways, there is that great moving viola line at the beginning, it seems to drop out for a little bit while guitar picks up the voila line, and then it comes back with a drawn-out aching and emotional line that is the best use of aching emotional strings since Max Richter remixed Vivaldi’s Summer. I think the viola is what takes this from being an album that I can only enjoy when caught in melancholy to an Album of all Moods and Seasons. (It's telling that I listened to it during a sunny week in the summer in Maryland and not covered with pine sap in a cabin in Oregon in the fall and still thought it a winner.)

There is something very different about having strings appear in an album and having a member of your band whose sole responsibility is to play the strings. For the former, you can imagine the leader of the band (James Mercer, Conor Oberst, Thom Yorke) at some point in the production process say, "I think we need some strings here," but because the strings aren't a part of the band, the song isn't written with the strings in mind. (As I wrote this, I imagined Phil Selway of Radiohead listening to Burn the Witch and thinking, "How are we going to do this live?") Usually, they are there to just add some color. (Even Matt Pond PA and their use of the cello feels this way. Matt Pond just wanted to have some background strings.) But when you have a member of the band (especially a trio in the case of Cabin Project), then the strings are as important to the structure of a song as the guitar, drums, or bass. The only other band that even compares to Cabin Project in this regard is the Levellers. By making the strings (fiddle for the Levs, viola for CP) so integral to the music, it creates a sound that is set apart from others.

Here come the questions...

If you are given the task of creating a being that is an animated representation of the sound of the band and, when you have assembled the structure of the figure from parts plundered from the local charnel houses and cemeteries and you only have to place the final bone and you turn to your assistant and he informs you that he has taken the sacred reliquaries from the Cathedral of Comedians that contain the bones of each of the Three Stooges, which Stooge Bone do you choose? Moe, Larry, Curly, Shemp, or Curly Joe? The answer is Larry. On screen, Larry is the embodiment of a sad viola. You put Larry's bone in and your creation now has the requisite melancholy to represent the sound of the band.

Which song would I choose to add to my If I Were to DJ an LDS Stake Dance playlist? Love You More. Oh man, this song would be a killer follow-up to I Would Live in Salt by the National which I would play near the end. Even better, as relationships grow out of dancing consecutively to these two songs (how could they not?) and then collapse, only then will the couple realize that Love You More is actually a sad break-up song, that the song that cemented their relationship also built into their relationship the seeds of its dissolution.

Which song could you convince an aging Lilith Fairer was that one song she heard Sarah McLachlan play in 1999 when got so close to Mother Gaia that she felt her feet sink deep into the earth, her heart echoed the natural rhythms of the earth, and she felt the life-giving wick move up through the soles of her feet until it filled her entire being? I am going to go with Crows (sample lyric: Singing like a banshee like they’re the only ones who know whether the wind is going to move us higher). Where I Stand would be a good choice here as well. But to do something to an aging Lilith Fairer would be cruel.

If SkyNet was going to hold off Judgement Day if you could make it feel true human sadness, would you play a song off of this album? No! This is too soft a melancholy to avert Judgement Day! Don't be fooled! If you are in this position, you should always play something from Taylor Swift. If SkyNet heard All Too Well, it would think: "If this is the depth of sadness that human beings can feel after a puppy love type of relationship, I cannot fathom the depths from mass extinction. I will destroy myself instead for I feel nothing."

Grade: A- (because its melancholy cannot save us)