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a considered opinion: taken by trees - east of eden
Anytime a Western artist embraces a style of music of an origin that is decidedly foreign to them, eyebrows raise. Although genre-bending is arguably more commonplace now than it was in the days when George Harrison confounded his mainstream audience by hanging out with Ravi Shankar and fiddling about with a sitar, there is still a certain stigma attached to artists who dip their toes into “exotic” musical waters. Many assume, often rightly so, that such efforts to incorporate the traditional forms of music of other cultures into a pop musician’s oeuvre amount to nothing more than cultural tourism. In choosing to draw heavily from traditional Pakistani music in her latest release under the Taken By Trees moniker, East of Eden, Victoria Bergsman is fighting an uphill battle from the start.
Having made the record in Pakistan with local musicians, Bergsman can hardly be faulted for going about this album half-heartedly. If her goal was to combine traditional Pakistani music with the understated, subdued folk-pop she plied on her 2007 debut Open Field, then she was certainly successful. The local players she enlisted for the session seem not just competent at playing their nation’s traditional style, but exceedingly proficient, particularly in the rolling hand percussion on “Day By Day”, one of the better songs here. The problem with East of Eden, then, lies not in a disingenuous approach to adopting this “foreign” music, but in Bergsman’s performance. While her reserved, quiet vocal style works (to varying degrees of success) within the confines of what could be considered her style up until this album, it falls flat when presented in this new context. “Wapas Karna”, a track in the second half of the album, features a female Pakistani singer, and no discernible contribution from Bergsman. Admittedly, she may have played some instrument on the song or controlled the song’s development, but the piece sounds so decidedly Pakistani that she may as well have contributed nothing. The vocals on “Wapas Karna” recall traditional Pakistani singing (think warbling… lots and lots of warbling), and have an impassioned, almost strained quality to them; this singer sounds like she is pushing herself. While I don’t like “Wapas Karna” and wonder why it was included at all – if Bergsman has no discernible presence, what makes it a Taken By Trees song? – the vocal performance here stands in stark contrast to Bergsman’s style. As I said earlier, whenever a Western pop musician begins to play around with music from cultures drastically different from their own (especially when they do so over the course of an entire album), their sincerity is called into question – what reason do we have to believe that this is not just some fleeting infatuation with some branch of world music? In a style of music that traditionally relies on energetic vocal performances, Bergsman’s sullen delivery and limited range make her sound completely removed from the proceedings; while I admit that she was, in all likelihood, thoroughly personally invested in this album, she sounds like she simply doesn’t give a fuck.
Globetrotting recording process aside, what will no doubt garner East Of Eden the most attention in the media is Bergsman’s inclusion of a slight revision of Animal Collective’s “My Girls”, here renamed “My Boys”. While it is a rather charming version of one of the best songs released so far this year, it is dragged down, like the rest of the album, by Bergsman’s vocal performance. Part of what makes “My Girls” so good is the unabashed exuberance of the vocals, and Bergsman completely fails to capture that, once again singing in her unwavering mumble. Ultimately, “My Boys” suffers from the same problem that plagues the album as a whole: with East Of Eden, Bergsman has taken a variety of rather interesting musical ideas and styles and used them to create something that is ultimately quite boring.
Some American DOES NOT RECOMMEND Taken By Trees’ East Of Eden.
