Aerial East
★★★★ Try Harder PARTISAN.
DL/LP
Brooklyn-based Texan’s second long-player of adventurous desert folk.
THE DAUGHTER of a military family, Aerial East spent much of her childhood in Europe, and that enforced wanderlust and her return to west Texas as a rootless teenager informs much of the desert folk-tinged Try Harder. Wholly drums-free, it takes time to reveal its charms. It’s a slow moving galleon of a collection where East’s wistful, Kate Havnevik-style vocals glide over textures which take unlikely tangents, such as what sounds like background trombone on the angelic I Love Dick, or the jazzy, jungle background noise which makes Doin’ Somethin’ sound like a ship-to-shore
broadcast. Yet, when she plays it straight, as on The Things We Build, which owes as much to The Wayfaring Stranger as Mary Margaret O’Hara, and the heart-breaking Ryan, she excels at unvarnished beauty too. The highly regarded Okay Kaya adds throaty vocals to the brief-but-bitter Jonas Said, but this is one woman’s distinctive vision.