SOUND CHOICE

The Thompson Fields

ArtistShare

Maria Schneider Orchestra

There’s a grand naturalist compulsion in Maria Schneider’s writing for large ensemble, and it has led her toward a more potent expression of her art. The Thompson Fields, the first album since 2007 to feature her namesake orchestra, teems with observant references to the pastoral world: prairies, exotic bird plumage, the dark gyre of a funnel cloud, the flutter of monarch butterflies.

Schneider, a composer and orchestrator of extravagant insight, has made these kinds of connections for a while. And as a conceptual device, it’s not a new story in jazz: Duke Ellington set a precedent for capturing the rhythms of life that Wynton Marsalis has diligently adapted to his own uses. But Schneider has her own trademark way of using timbre and harmony to bring a tactile presence to the dimensions of sound — and more impressively, of applying the same tools to illuminate emotional terrain.

Because she works at her own pace, she has had time to break in most of the album’s pieces, including the title track, a sweeping rumination featuring Lage Lund on guitar and Frank Kimbrough on piano, composed more than five years ago. Walking By Flashlight, the album’s overture, adapts a theme from her 2013 album Winter Morning Walks (ArtistShare), for chamber orchestra and soprano, which won three Grammy Awards in the classical field.

The orchestra, as a single breathing organism, is Schneider’s instrument, but she also puts a great deal of responsibility on her soloists.

So a track called Arbiters Of Evolution becomes a swaggering concerto for the tenor saxophonist Donny McCaslin, the ensemble surging and receding behind him. Something similar happens with the alto saxophonist Steve Wilson on Nimbus, an evocation of heavy weather; and with Gary Versace, playing accordion on A Potter’s Song, dedicated to the memory of the trumpeter Laurie Frink, a long-time fixture of the band.

The album’s deluxe packaging, with its handsome photographs, illustrations and text, amplifies its brilliant musical ambitions and serves as a statement of principle for Schneider, a vocal critic of music streaming services. Compensation is her main argument, but the physical experience of music also seems like a factor.

— Nate Chinen

Before We Forgot How To Dream

Rough Trade

Soak

With her high, shaky, scratchy voice, her quiet guitar picking and her thick Northern Ireland accent, Soak — a 19-year-old songwriter from Londonderry named Bridie Monds-Watson — sounds shy and gawky, as if it takes all her nerve to get through a song. On her debut album, Before We Forgot How To Dream, she defines herself modestly: “C’mon, c’mon, be just like me / Be a nobody.”

But there’s no diffidence in the songs themselves. Soak exposes longings, fears, traumas and resolve — sometimes elliptically, sometimes with disarming bluntness. “Slowly holding to things you told me / Most probably stole from online poetry,” she sings in Reckless Behaviour, which goes on to become her closest thing to a teenage manifesto: “We are reckless, ready for apocalypse / We are golden until the very last of us fall.”

But through most of the songs, she broods over connections close to home: family, friends, romances. The album’s title comes from the lyrics of Oh Brother, which mourns her growing distance from him. “Where is your warmth? Where is your heart?” she pleads, sounding ever more isolated as reverberation spreads around her guitar. In the cryptic 24 Windowed House, the singer could be an abused child, afraid her family will be torn apart if her mother discovers what has happened. “It’s a story I cannot bear to tell / You gotta leave things as things will be,” she sings. “Even if it’s killing me.”

Soak’s voice and her guitar, acoustic or electric, are at the centre of the album, and at times they are all that’s heard. But Soak and her producer, Tommy McLaughlin from the Irish folk-rock band Villagers, also build retro arrangements around her, often hinting at the 1960s. The album’s most pop-like song, Sea Creatures, complains about people who “tell you they love you but they don’t mean it / I don’t think they know what they mean”, over a beat and a string section echoing Stand By Me.

In Hailstones Don’t Hurt, a just-broke-up song, Soak decides, “We should move on” over a steadfast slow march, but then multiplies her voice into a chorale that rejoins, “But I don’t wanna”. As happens so often throughout the album, her fragility becomes her strength.

— Jon Pareles

Before The World Was Big

Wichita Recordings

Girlpool

The last words sung by Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad, in the final seconds of Girlpool’s 24-minute first album, are these: “My mind is almost 19 and I still feel angry / Is it pouring out my body, my nervous aching.”

On the words “angry” and “aching”, their hollering voices are set a minorthird apart. Who’s who? I had to watch a video of them singing it: Tucker sings the higher note. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Their timbre and phrasing match almost completely. Your ear starts to try to tell them apart and almost immediately stops.

Tucker and Tividad, both still teenagers, are friends from Los Angeles now living in Philadelphia and the only members of Girlpool. They accompany their voices with blocky patterns on bass and guitar; no drums and very seldom any other sounds. Their voices are untrained and their harmonies unostentatious. If their music implies post-punk, it also might imply the sound of the Carter Sisters in the 1950s: a magnetic and self-protective closeness.

Those harmonies add some decorousness to simple music; they also take the edge off words that transmit yearning or hurting or young anxiety. These songs, written and sung with more subtlety since the group’s first EP from late last year, tend to fixate on relationships and change: leaving places, growing apart, growing up. It’s an extended eulogy to childhood and the sense of a limited universe. “I just miss how it felt standing next to you / Wearing matching dresses before the world was big,” they sing in the album’s title track.

The really chilling parts of Before The World Was Big, though, come out not in harmonies but in loud, force-field unison passages. It almost doesn’t matter what they’re singing about. The sound of their voices together contains it all.

— Ben Ratliff