At this point in my “music reviewing career” (I don’t think anybody appreciates more than me just how cool that sounds–in fact, it may only sound cool to me), there is no point in denying that I’m a fan of Amanda Winterhalter. Not that I would want to and not that anybody else would ask that of me. And if you haven’t listened to any of her material or watched her powerful live performances on YouTube, then I really feel bad for you.
I kicked off this review cycle by talking about the way that Jack Shriner’s Frames in Motion took Levi Fuller & the Library’s colossal “Colossal” (sorry, but there’s really no better way to state that) from one musical realm or genre and ran it through their very specific approach to composition and sound to end up with something all their own. In that, and really, throughout this compilation, we’ve seen transformations and interpretations and even melodic and harmonic shifts and THAT, my friends, is what makes the kind of collection that you want to keep in rotation.
If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have seen the thread of continuity and reinvention running through Ball of Wax 59: each artist is covering a song by the succeeding artist. Now we’ve come to the end and it’s Amanda’s turn to cover Frames in Motion’s chiming “Euptablisses.” And herein lies not just the closing track, but one of this volume’s neatest tricks. At the beginning, Frames in Motion turned ragged indie rock (indie Americana, if you will) into ’70s AM radio rock (if you dare suggest that I don’t mean this as high praise, I will challenge you here and now to a game of Sudden Death UNO)–and here at the end, Amanda Winterhalter is turning ’70s AM radio rock into dusty, dusky, wispy Americana. And so now you do with this compilation what you do with all great collections of music: YOU PUT IT ON REPEAT. There you go. Ya feelin’ it? I could be talking out the side of my head, but I’m calling this meta-recursion. I’ve coined it, it’s a thing now, and so let’s get past that and talk turkey.
You don’t listen to Amanda Winterhalter without taking note of the voice. Yes, she plays guitar. Yes, she normally records and performs with a band that can weep through country music’s real progeny and then growl through the bastard child of Midwest post-punk. No matter the context, her voice is the unifying force. It’s impossible to describe without using emotive or tactile adjectives. From her lower registers, through twangs both gentle and firm, and up to a falsetto that sometimes feels like it’s a secret note that exists outside of our Western 12-tone scale but complements it nonetheless. Take all of that and then throw it into the frightening (for artists) chemical solvent known as the “stripped down arrangement.” This is where the bells and whistles and most instrumentation get removed and a song is revealed for the strength and beauty–or weakness and mundanity–of its lyrics and lyrical melody. That’s exactly the solvent that Amanda has applied in transforming “Euptablisses” into her own beautiful folk tune and I am happy to report that Shriner’s solute (yeah, I dig chemistry) retains its magic and mystery.