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Miss Murgatroid & Petra Haden Hearts & Daggers File Under: Music |
Petra Haden, as both a vocalist and a violinist, has done a lot of things. She’s been in The Decemberists and The Rentals. She recorded an acapella version of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” for the Guilt By Association compilation. A compilation of covers released in 2007. A cover my friends played so often I began to associate that singular act with the entirety of Petra Haden’s career. Thankfully, Petra Haden and accordionist Miss Murgatroid (alias of photographer Alica J. Rose) have released a follow-up disc to their first collaborative album, Bella Neurox.
The album is strange in a lot of ways. The instrumentation is almost entirely expert accordion and violin, which makes everything feel like old-timey historical documentaries about quaint sea towns. While a lot of the album is instrumental, most of the sparse vocals are simply non-lyrical or one-word melodies and harmonies. The ethereal nature of the vocals merges well with the rich sounds of the instruments, and the album, on the whole, is very pretty. Critically speaking, it tends to drone all the same after a while (save “Another Day,” an exquisite and haunting track which has both words as well as percussion), which makes it especially good for art museums, tea parties and libraries.
—Juliet Bennet-Rylah
