My Brightest Diamond – Bring Me The Workhorse

I am suddenly haunted. Not the ghostly ghouls that danced around your bed during your tender years, the years when shadows housed bodies that you shut your eyes to as you lay in your frozen framework of bones knowing that your toes hanging out of your sheet, if moved, would cause a stir you didn’t dare to come to pass. And none of those women beasts either, the ones that squeezed your heart with both hands, kneeling in prayer and clenched fists to bring you down with them. No, none of that actually.

It’s just you, your isolated self in an empty room with a window to the frozen forest outside. Your framed view of the white and brisk, leaves that would crack if nature allowed, snow that should curl around stomping feet that would lead you back. Back where? To the ghouls, to the beasts, to your self. And in this imaginary getaway, nightmare for the naive, dreamland for the aged, our isolation is our home to our haunting as well as our dreams.

It is somewhere within this isolation that a soundtrack plays darkly. A voice, that of a fallen angel that landed somewhere just out of view, amidst the trees and the frozen leaves. Out there you can imagine her broken, black wings as she raises them with her howling voice in response to the pain of her distant fall; yet also in rapture of the escape she has seemed to con. I could hardly imagine any voice less than that of Shara Worden, the black-eyed beauty behind My Brightest Diamond. Somewhere in an imagination where Antony has a begotten sister, one that studied the subtle emotional timing of Buckley as well as lived off film noir, My Brightest Diamond has written its first tune. And this imagery makes it somewhat strange that such moody music, filled with dark clouds raised by angelic string flourishes and overpowering Bjork-like vocal hiccupping, finds its home at Asthmatic Kitty, a ship guided by Sufjan and his quirky, easy on the ears and heart songwriting. And yet with the small roster, it is a seemingly obvious step to take in branching out the family tree that Sufjan and Asthmatic Kitty have planted.

[mp3] My Brightest Diamond – Dragonfly
[mp3] My Brightest Diamond – Something Of An End (Planet Claire Session)
[mp3] My Brightest Diamond – When Doves Cry (Live Prince Cover)

Buy My Brightest Diamond’s Bring Me The Workhorse here.
Download Bring Me The Workhorse at eMusic.

10/09/06 – Wiltern LG (w/ Sufjan Stevens) SOLD OUT