Identity Theft 3.0

22. Alastair Ottesen – Alastair Ottesen December 6, 2010

12 tracks in only 23 minutes, but somehow nothing feels rushed. Each song only lasts a few moments before dying, but each one develops with such self-assured patience that the moments themselves seem to stand outside of time. These songs are weighty, too, despite their brevity, and despite the arrangements’ tendency toward minimalism. Underneath Ottesen’s placid voice and elegant melodies are lyrics that evince a deep familiarity with loneliness, anxiety, and loss. But the weight is a function of patience; it doesn’t burden the listener. Alastair Ottesen is a pop record, after all. The songs are pretty; you’re supposed to enjoy them.

Pop music delivers simple pleasures. With a lot of pop, they’re pleasures that resemble things like eating fast food or watching television. But on this album, songs like “Alone” imitate different pleasures: the experience of standing on a beach and losing a train of thought while staring at the ocean. “Alone” consists of a single rhyming couplet; it’s a compressed piece of poetry, but the song doesn’t submit itself to the lyrics. While Ottesen repeats the two lines at his characteristically measured pace, cascades of layered violins and wordless vocals fade in from silence, intensify, and drown them.

Ottesen features his voice prominently on this record; his functional and unassuming guitar, piano, and toy piano accompaniments don’t ever rise up to challenge it. It’s the tension between the words (the passages of compressed, meditative poetry) and the not-words (the layered, contrapuntal walls of wordless oohs and aahs) that sheds light on the work as a whole. Just like the album’s cover, which is neither a picture of trees nor a picture of the sun, this album, while it expresses a lot through poetry, never gives it the upper hand over the music. The wordless refrain in “Still” relieves the song of its heavy imagery, reminding the listener not to try to resolve imagery, but to look through it instead. The odd meter sections of “Mockingbird” provides a subtle contrast to the rest of the song’s Zen-like simplicity, combining the asymmetrical and the hypnotic. And the coda of “December 16″ illuminates a strain of optimism that had been hiding between the lines of its verses. The pleasures here are simple, but the music’s inner dialectic makes them difficult to assimilate, and even more difficult to express.

Ottesen’s musical influences don’t strain to hide themselves: there’s some Brian Wilson in here, giving the musical architecture its distinct baroque edge, and probably some Elliott Smith too, whispering honesty directly into the listener’s ear instead of losing its composure and overstating its case. But this album isn’t steeped in the details of its creator’s past listening patterns; it’s steeped in its creator’s relationship to silence and solitude. You can see it in the detached self-abnegation of “Mockingbird” (“there’s no ‘I’ sitting here, watching you…”), and in the stark, unstrained empathy in “You Loved Him So.” There is pop that placates, and pop that pleads, but Ottesen’s pop engages. It’s a reaching out that isn’t tainted by desperation or mixed motives, a reaching out that implicitly demands as much patience and inner stillness from the listener as it contains within itself.

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