“Consider the snowglobe. When you pick it up, you’re holding something that’s capable of conjuring absolutes of beauty, force, and fragility — I mean, shake it and a season just happens — but the snowglobe you tend to end up with is something like this. Somewhere between reality and the possibilities offered by this strange incandescent paperweight, kitsch and the desire to transform the transcendent into the ornamental (and eerily narcissistic) intervenes. And so it is with chamber pop. In this post-Sufjan age (in the years AS, for the calendar-minded of you), the idea of people working with a bunch of classically-trained players to make literate, ornate music has unfortunately taken on a pretty precious set of connotations through overuse and abuse; like, if you can get through the video for “16 Military Wives,” you’re on the wrong side of history, and I won’t even start on Patrick Watson. Even Sufjan h(H)imself, who made made the highpoint for fussy, anal whimsy, backed away from the idea. Like one of those ingenue female protagonists from a Belle and Sebastian song, he liberated everyone from their inhibitions, and everyone in turn got a little fucked over by the results. Yet, as ever, the antidote to diminishing returns in this kind of thing is subsuming everything to craft and integrity, and Arc Iris is one of the best crafted records anyone, anywhere will release this year.
Based in Queens, Liam Singer has been around for a while, but Arc Iris smacks with the freshness of putting your head into the first ever grocery store refrigeration system, quietly stacking up a pile of minor miracles until the picture transcends the brushstrokes. Laboriously tinkered over with sideman par excellence Scott Solter, it’s a flowing suite of nocturnes, militaristic interludes, and eerie chamber torch ballads, lit by stunningly and delicately deployed woodwinds and keyboards in wandering and richly pained-over arrangements. This is a record for precious solitude without either preciousness or loneliness, which is as deft as all hell a thing to accomplish: is Liam Singer the Mahela Jayawardene of classical pop music? It’s big enough to fit inside and small enough to carry around.”