Somewhere between the musical aesthetic of Sharon Van Etten and the vocal tone of Zooey Deschanel is songstress Lia Ices. If the comparison raises some eyebrows, that is because “Grown Unknown” is a very hard musical nut to crack.
At times poetic, at times jaunty and always nebulous, “Grown Unknown” somehow manages to feel ancient and modern at the same time.
It begins with “Love Is Won,” a beautiful song which begins with just downtempo, jazzy piano and Ices’s smoky and airy vocals. After a little while, sparse bass and drum add in to create an atmospheric beauty. Even Ices’s lyric feel like poetry, though they are often times hard to discern. And when they are discernible, they often don’t make much sense, such as this pair of lines: “A puzzle planted on the forest floor has grown tall by now / Forever is asleep it is a tiny jewel in the tiger mouth ….”
Unfortunately, once listeners have heard “Love Is Won” in its entirety, they may as well have heard the rest of the album. Every song tends to feel the same, down to Ices’s vocal stylings, which rarely vary. In fact, it is at times hard to actively listen to the album because everything blurs together.
That being said, the album contains some excellent elements, mostly on the instrumental side of the music. “Grown Unknown” and “Ice Wine” contain some really excellent string work which brings some old-style musical swagger to the two tracks. “New Myth” features the best instrumental work on the album, including appearances by what sound like horns and flutes. The song’s orchestral feel adds a certain majesty to the song and provides dynamic change that the album sorely needs.
The best moment on the album by far, however, is “Daphne,” which features a brilliant guest vocal appearance by Justin Vernon of Bon Iver. Great instrumental work and the harmonizing between Ices and Vernon combine to form a multi-dimensional track that is one of the few songs on the album worth playing over and over again.
While “Grown Unknown” is a good album, it fails to cash in on the potential of excellent instrumental accompaniment, as well as Ices’s wonderful singing voice. Hopefully, in the future, she will be able to expand and more effectively mesh good individual musical elements into a more interesting set of songs.
On a weekly basis, the A&E mailbox is filled with albums and movies sent to us for review. Unfortunately, we can’t review them all. Well, now we’re going to try. “Stuff From the Shelf” is a regular blog series in which A&E reviews the albums, movies and books that have been sent to us for review.