FROM PTW, 7/9/07: Christy & Emily, “Noah”

CHRISTY AND EMILY - “Noah”
from Gueen's Head (The Social Registry)
Avant-Folk // Out Now

Brooklyn duo Christy Edwards and Emily Manzo, a.k.a. Christy & Emily are a gauzy oasis in a somewhat disappointing year for avant-folk treats. Sure, Panda Bear’s soft-focus, loop-chutes charmed and Fursaxa’s wafer-thin folk operatics invited, but neither totally involved (“ephemeral” doesn’t necessarily equal “eclipsing”; if it did, we’d happily wear out a fresh set of headphones every month). If Gueen’s Head, C&E’s debut for hip psych-noise standard-bearers the Social Registry, is an arresting delight, then “Noah” represents its rippling, hazy pinnacle. Here, rock guitarist Edwards and classical pianist Manzo are positively drowning for each other’s thirsts. Delirious vocal glides emerge from opposing corners and meet in a languorous crisscross before vanishing back into the shimmy rue from whence they came. Both women are reading from the same lyric sheet, but their anesthetized deliveries smudge meaning into a gliding, lysergic paste that melts atop a bottomless, sluggish mass of simmering fret percolations, narcoleptic vibraphones and wobbly Wurlitzers. It’s a dizzily de-centered swim that shouldn’t have to end, but as with all things, it ultimately must.

Christy Edwards on “Noah”:

“Noah” sounds like a slow, delirious drowning—in a good way. Is this the feel you were going for?

We’d always imagined this being sung by a drunken choir of our friends and pirates. And yeah, the crew is drunk, so we’re all going down.

Who is Noah? Are you two harmonizing about the biblical Noah?

I’m glad that you are making biblical connections to the song, and there is a general nautical theme to the record as a whole. I almost don’t want to demystify it for you, but I wrote that song for my mother, prior to and in anticipation of a visit we made together to her family in Asia. Noah is a real person, and we named the song after him, because the initial recording we did was used in an art installation he did. All the heavy connotations the name brought along were a bonus.

Are you planning to see Steve Carrell’s new-Noah comedy Evan Almighty?

There’s a big billboard up for that movie that we see on the way to our practice space. I liked The 40 Year-Old Virgin, so yeah, I think maybe we will -RAYMOND CUMMINGS Monday, July 9th, 2007