#ruth garbus

Of course, Ruth’s intimate vocals and imaginative lyrics pre-date these lessons. But the production of Kleinmeister, recorded on two-inch tape at Guilford Sound in Vermont, clears the DIY fog of past records and the clarity brings her vocal explorations and lyrical concepts to the fore, seemingly emboldened with a new confidence. Short and articulate poetic phrasings are more likely to catch your ear. A phrase like “Adirondack littering,” which ends “Pitiful Poetry,” feels equally like an unadulterated sound-based utterance, as if Garbus massaged the phrase from the back of her cheek on the spot, and like Garbus had been sitting on the phrase for years, waiting to place it in the right place. Poised yet uninhibited, Ruth’s voice makes you believe it’s somehow both.

Sympathetic with Shintoism’s animist inklings, Garbus has a passion for giving life to lifeless materials and reminding us that the liveliest scenarios are still composed of matter and applied meaning. Opener “Strash” takes inspiration from Elizabeth Royte’s book Garbage Land, an extended look at the human waste and its many tributaries. Garbus threads together sensual lyrics, elaborating a dimension of performance over intimate sequences (“coming on a stage covered in roses and poppies/rooted in the sand covering our ancient plastic toys”), with illustrious lyrics that paint the extended life of waste (“plasticated paper and popsicle sticks covered in algae” or “insurmountable heaps, hot and green”). Garbus uses her animist explorations to make intimate scenarios seem distant and to magnify the importance of excess that skips our minds, an effective way of accentuating the current fucked environmental state.

Each of the songs on Kleinmeister is accompanied by Ruth’s guitar, either steeped in a flanger effect and tapped on, or softly strummed with little effect. Garbus’s voice navigates melody and inflection the way something does in a world much larger than itself, full of thought, instinct, and feeling. Her compositions will occasionally take clean turns, quickly and casually, that provide stunning moments, but mostly you’ll be taken by the carefully articulated melodies. A stride away from both perceived and imagined, her lyrics remain vivid however the themes end up breaking. She has both the crisp and vibrant feel of early Fairport Convention, and in parts, the near sprawling folk interplay that makes Joanna Newsom’s work seem as much extended improvisation as intricate composition. Kleinmeister fulfills its German namesake both in translation, “Little Masters,” and its reference to the highly detailed prints from the 16th century German group.