Ivy
Long Distance (Nettwerk America)
by Marc Hirsh
Ivy
Long Distance (Nettwerk America)
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in Space City Rock, Fall 2002
It seems ludicrous in retrospect that it never occurred to Burt Bacharach to have a Frenchwoman sing his frothy pop concoctions. After all, if you want something as cool, as sultry and as suave-to-the-core as Bacharach always seemed to want, there's nothing quite so dead-on as les jeunes filles de Paris. Does Ivy know this? It would seem so, since Dominique Durand's whole approach is about distance. She's one of those puzzling singers whose voice doesn't carry much behind it besides conviction and the possibility of bottomless fathoms of hurt. In other words, she does not have a great voice, but she may just be a great singer.
Long Distance provides Durand with exactly what a great singer needs but so rarely gets: an environment in which she can shine by reflecting off of everybody else instead of just standing out by default. In the four years since Apartment Life, Ivy have developed an extraordinary sense of structure and a deep commitment to having it complement the material. Andy Chase's unresolved acoustic chords create an atmosphere of unfinished (perhaps unfinishable) melancholy, while Adam Schlesinger's insistent bass ensures that this swoony hour-long ode to impermanence is nothing if not ludicrously danceable.
Still, as much as I worship the guy who gave us "That Thing You Do!" and who will (I pray) someday bring us a great Fountains of Wayne album (at long last), Long Distance is all Durand's baby, and she runs with it like a champ. "Nothing's ever going to make you happy," she coos about midway through, but the finger's pointed more often right back at herself. When in "Disappointed" she swears, "I could never be what you want me to be/I'm just going to leave you disappointed," her delivery makes it pretty clear that the party at fault is the person doing all the talking.
Maybe that's why, eventually, language simply fails Durand.Left with untold things to say but no earthly way to put it in words, she resorts to nonsense singsong syllables (not unprecedented, as attested by Apartment Life's "Ba Ba Ba") and trusts you to get the point. As the sadness of "Edge of the Ocean" swells to its peak, she sighs a gentle and heartbreaking "sha la la" refrain; in the gorgeous "While We're In Love," she coaxes us out of the song with a hypnotized "ba ba da ba da," merely one of a dozen hooks in the song (out of probably a hundred hooks on the album) which find themselves gloriously piled atop one another by the end.
And I wish that some of that extended beyond "Lucy Doesn't Love You," after which my attention starts to waver. There's some nice stuff happening there, to be sure; when all is said and done, the entire second half of the album is nothing less than well-crafted and enjoyable. In fact, it's about on par with Apartment Life, an album that I've always liked but never really felt floated high enough. For the first six songs of Long Distance , Ivy finally soars to that point and well beyond, delivering a sustained sequence as strong as any I've heard in a good long while. The rest is a pleasant afterglow. You'll forgive me if I go ahead and consider that a triumph.