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Dani Siciliano - Likes... Forget for the moment that Dani Siciliano is Matthew Herbert’s wife: she rightfully owns Likes… , which is the latest offering from the K7 label, and her impressive freshman foray into glitch jazz. Hubby Herbert does step in now and then to lend a hand at production, but Siciliano does most of the heavy lifting herself, writing and producing most of the songs, and often playing the clarinet as well. (The CD’s artwork further betrays her fondness for the instrument.)
The album’s opener, Same, is a languid nine-minute piece that builds Bolero-like with Siciliano’s whispered gal-noir lyrics eventually fragmenting into cut ’n paste snippets which build into a sonic dervish, accompanied by steady beats inter-cut with stabs of brass. At its fever pitch, the once warm, enveloping tune transmogrifies into a driving threatening near-symphony.
Next, Siciliano shakes Kurt Cobain’s Come As You Are out and wears it like a sultry but deadly jazz standard, replete with muted French horns and pizzicato bass. Her vocals slither and lick at your ears so seductively that you’ll never hear Cobain’s version the same way again. It might seem an odd, even inadvisable choice, but Siciliano pulls it off with aplomb.
The slight number Canes and Trains (both are listed as instruments) and metronomic Walk the Line follow, each endowed with piercing staccato rhythm. Next, Siciliano quite literally samples a single guitar string on One String, before swapping vocals with Herbert’s Icelandic buddy Ornelias Mugison on All Thee Above. His raspy vocals and Herbert’s wheezy accordion contribute to the song’s ragged lilt, summoning a spirit dwelling along a continuum somewhere between Tom Waits and Tricky. Extra Ordinary takes us back into the rattling, propulsive territory of the earlier tracks with Siciliano the conductor of a sonic locomotive hurtling towards a very sudden stop. Extraordinary, indeed: this may be the disk’s most arresting moment.
If the following tune, She Say Cliché, seems somewhat less impressive, perhaps it’s mainly because it appears rather skeletal huddling besides the previous tracks. Still, Siciliano doesn’t slip significantly; she does surprise though; almost sliding into a Macy Gray squeal for the chorus of Red against a plaintive gaggle of clarinets.
Rounding out the disk: the breathy, but stately Collaboration (Ready), a collaboration with her husband, and Remember to Forget, a tender torch song sung against, you guessed it, the melancholy strains of the clarinet. It’s a soft yet exquisitely painful ending.
Likes… may be a little malnourished lyrically, but that fact gets lost in the music’s delicious swirl. Even the cover art contributes to the proceedings. San Francisco artist John Patrick McKenzie created a lovely patchwork of words appropriately reflecting Siciliano’s effort. Born in the Philippines, McKenzie is a gifted autistic artist working out of San Francisco’s remarkable Creativity Explored Visual Arts Center. He even inspired the album title: When Siciliano commissioned him to create one of his distinctive text collages, she sent him a list of her favorite things. His completed artwork was a large circle full of phrases, most of which began with the words “Dani Siciliano likes…”.
My only real complaint about the album doesn’t even concern the recordings or the cover art, but the details about them: I needed a friggin’ electron microscope to read the meager liner notes. But in a sense that’s also a sign that I wanted to dig into this disk for all it was worth.
Overall, Likes... proves to be another fine entry into the K7 catalogue. Siciliano’s debut establishes her as more than just another downtempo siren, her supple tunes managing to be rich and experimental yet still sweetly seductive. And, by disk’s end, you might even find yourself nurturing a clarinet fetish.
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