Asthmatic Kitty Records
2008
A Thousand Shark's Teeth
About This Album
It's not surprising that My Brightest Diamond's second album was originally intended to be a string quartet-based work, or that it was six years in the making. A Thousand Shark's Teeth is much more orchestrated, polished, and ambitious than Bring Me the Workhorse, and draws even more from Shara Worden's classical training (as well as the work of Maurice Ravel, Tricky, Tom Waits, and painter Anselm Kiefer). The album's elegant instrumentation and arrangements are nothing if not impressive, whether they're relatively simple, as on "If I Were Queen," which concentrates on Worden's immaculate soprano and pizzicato strings, or lavish, as on "Inside a Boy," where chilly strings and keyboards rise to meet Worden's ice princess vocals. However, A Thousand Shark's Teeth sacrifices some of the playfulness and energy that made Bring Me the Workhorse so compelling, and at times Worden's ambitions come close to getting the better of her. "Apples"' plinking percussion -- which owes as much to Evelyn Glennie as it does to Tom Waits -- makes day-to-day chores like folding laundry sound like performance art, and as eerily lovely as "Black & Coustaud" is, its frosty cabaret whimsy is so theatrical that it vaguely resembles an avant-garde show tune.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and 8)

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