Thrill Jockey
2004
Trust Not Those In Whom Without Some Touch Of Madness
About This Album
Given her powerful delivery and flair for sullied drama, Thalia Zedek's next solo project could've easily been an album of covers. Been Here and Gone and You're a Big Girl Now, after all, had included interpretations of work by Leonard Cohen, Dylan, and the Velvet Underground -- why not put out an album of such explorations? Tracing the contours between Jacques Brel and James Chance, say. Alas, it wasn't to be. Maybe that recording is still in the cards, but in the meantime we have the sweeping bruised grace of Trust Not Those in Whom Without Some Touch of Madness, and it's a keeper. Like Richard Buckner, Zedek holds the amazing capacity to make the saddest stuff compelling, even heartening. Madness begins at a gently threatening Velvets' pace, Zedek's guitar, skeletal as the viola of cohort David Michael Curry (Willard Grant Conspiracy), roots around in corners. She's obviously been hurt -- the song's a warning to a departing lover -- but its arrangement lurches and leaps like a thunderstorm fighting with shafts of sunlight. "Ship" refuses to be a straight-up dirge, see, and that makes its sentiment all the more gripping. Throughout this record as it's been since the old days, Zedek never fails to put her very soul into each syllable, and her commitment is matched by the instrumentation.
Track List (try tracks 1,3,4,8 and 9)

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