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Heather Leigh, "I Abused Animal"
Improbably, this is Leigh’s first true solo studio album after a slew of limited edition home recordings and a lengthy and illustrious career of collaborating with damn near every major artist in the fringes of the improv music scene (Jandek, Chris Corsano, Peter Brötzmann, Smegma, etc.).  Given the volume and diversity of her previous work, I was not at all sure what to expect from I Abused Animal.  I know I did not expect it to sound like it actually does though.  While there is certainly a fair amount of Leigh's distinctively warped and iconoclastic guitar playing, Animal often feels far more like an otherworldly outsider folk album than the work of an experimental/improv guitar luminary.  For the most part, that was a sound directional choice, as Animal is a legitimately unique and compelling album.  I suspect it will probably be a bit too strange and hermetic for some listeners, but that is their problem.
As a genre, the blues has had an extremely unfortunate stylistic trajectory, steadily degenerating from the incredible promise of Robert Johnson and his milieu into a bunch of white baby boomers jamming out and making guitar faces at rib joints.  Fortunately, there was also a much stranger, darker, and more abstract concurrent evolution that eventually yielded artists like Heather Leigh's erstwhile collaborators Jandek and Christina Carter.  Leigh is a similarly intense and idiosyncratic member of that pantheon, channeling life's anguish with uncomfortable directness and casting away any clutter or structure that could potentially distract from the catharsis.  In fact, she even sets aside her pedal steel guitar for the opening title piece, delivering her cryptic and creepy confession as a quavering a capella performance that resembles an old spiritual, a form that she is no doubt intimately familiar with having grown up in West Virginia.  It is a gripping, gutsy, and intimate performance that sets the bar quite high for the rest of the album.  I am not sure the rest of Animal quite rises to the same level, aside from late-album highlight "The Return," but the consolation prize is that Leigh's listenability increases as her intensity decreases.  Great art is rarely comfortable, passive entertainment.
While the addition of guitar does generally make the remainder of Animal somewhat less haunted-sounding, the other five songs are still quite a long way from anything remotely conventional.  Even at her most melodic and vibrant, as she is on the unexpectedly This Mortal Coil-esque "Quicksand," Leigh reduces her guitar playing to nothing more than an echoing, hyper-minimal four-note repeating pattern.  Elsewhere, such as on the gnarled, vibrato-crazy "All That Heaven Allows," she stomps her distortion pedal and erupts into a wild, one-woman psych-rock freak-out that she somehow manages to wrap a vocal melody around.  It might not be entirely successful as a song, but it is certainly a bold, memorable, and striking effort nonetheless (it sounds like someone mashed together a Big Blood album with an especially lysergic and free-form Blue Cheer live recording).  Later, "Passionate Reluctance" abandons the guitar again for an unexpectedly pretty and folky second vocal performance before Animal plunges back into darkness for good.  "The Return" is my clear pick for album highlight, enhancing one of Leigh's strongest vocal melodies with a distorted, ugly, and intermittently disrupted pattern of heavy guitar swells.  The final "Fairfield Fantasy" achieves a similar degree of warped beauty, albeit in very different fashion: its finger-picked arpeggios are frequently derailed by wild vibrato that transforms the otherwise heavenly piece into something that sounds like a curdled and disorienting Hawaiian nightmare.
While both the songs themselves and Leigh’s singular guitar approach are the obvious draws, I actually found Leigh herself to be Animal’s single most compelling aspect, as her aesthetic is quite a fascinating puzzle to try to wrap my head around.  Aside from frequently sounding possessed, somnambulant, and otherwise alien, Leigh has quite a singular knack for bringing together seemingly very disparate threads and making them all seem perfectly natural (albeit within the context of a very unnatural album).  I can perhaps see how her harsher, more cathartic fare is the inverse of her more melodic, simple, and tender side, but outliers like "I Abuse Animal" and especially the perverse "All That Heaven Allows" muddy the waters quite a bit.  "Heaven" truly feels like someone amusingly dared Leigh to try to make a coherent song from the craziest, messiest acid-rock excess imaginable, which sits quite bizarrely next to the quiet, wide-eyed intensity found elsewhere.  I think she won the bet though.  More importantly, Leigh's many facets somehow all fit together into a satisfying whole and they never feel at all like a jumbled, schizophrenic mess (even though it seems like they should).  In fact, all the various threads only serve to deepen the listening experience, as I Abused Animal easily ranks among the most gripping uneasy listening of the year.
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