Phylactery Factory

We Say...

Review by J. Edward Keyes

Destruction reigns on Phylactery Factory, from the crumbling art deco house that opens the album to the beached whale slowly rotting away at its center. The first album from White Hinterland — a group helmed and directed by Boston singer/songwriter Casey Dienel — Factory is one big obituary, a testament to a world where all that glitters is probably decaying from the inside.

You'd never know it from just a casual listen. Casey Dienel sings with a kind of Baroque relish, rolling and hiccupping phrases, making each line as deliberately sculpted and richly embellished as a white marble balustrade. It's tempting to compare her fluttering delivery to Nellie McKay's, but Dienel isn't nearly as whimsical or aloof or sarcastic. Instead, her songs are straight darkness — a long black night at the jazz club Ozymandius. "Hometown Hooray" may open like a trolley ride into the Land of Make-Believe, with glittering vibraphone and two-step piano, but give Dienel just two minutes and the song becomes a grim lullaby for a slain soldier who died for no good reason. "Dreaming of Plum Trees," a breathless jazz vamp built around a tumbling keyboard phrase, introduces a barefoot little girl only to have her slice her foot open on a chunk of glass halfway through.

All of this bleeding and rotting and dying sounds like a drag, but in reality it's a large part of what makes Phylactery Factory so thoroughly riveting. Dienel is obsessed with exploring the ways beautiful things go bad; that she wraps these considerations inside whirligig piano-pop is a kind of further Statement Of Theme — big doom wrapped in glimmering packages. Phylactery Factory is the loveliest funeral you've ever attended.