Laika - Wherever I Am I Am What is Missing
I've been a bit put-off from Laika's music for a few years. I -- exuberantly -- went to see them on their last tour and caught them on an abrasive off-night early in the schedule. The caustic vibe of the evening was so unlike what I enjoy about their music that the galloping drum work of their music suddenly seemed harsh and claustrophobic. Fortunately, the new record, Wherever I Am I Am What Is Missing, both erases that memory and reminds me how marvelous their Polynesian polyrhythms meets English dream pop style is.
Laika, for all their Russian cosmonaut trappings, are really just a slippery voiced Yma Sumac fronting a South Seas Cargo Cult ceremonial rite. Margaret Fiedler's voices is just so much spun honey -- smooth, golden, and O how effortlessly it slides down into your ear canal. "Girl Without Hands" shuffles us into their complex world by introducing the elements gradually, working us up to the whole picture. Lou Ciccotelli's dense drum work always emphasizes the beat you don't expect, a beat pattern which seems off-kilter until the bass drifts in and supplies a facet you didn't realize was missing from the rhythms. Fiedler's guitar work is piecemeal and falls across the mix like scattered sunlight. Guy Fixsen provides a flood of electronic elements, tiny particles of organic sound which are swirled into the mix and become colored strands of melody. And, finally, her voice floats over the top like a fragrent breeze, the overdubbed echoes sounding like marsh gas ghosts who are trying to pass as real phantoms but their voices can't quite mesh with the physical singer.
The title of the record is taken from Mark Strand's 1963 poem, "Keeping Things Whole," and the brushstroke figure on the cover mirrors the ephemereal physicality of the narrative voice in Strand's poem. "We all have reasons for moving," the poem reads, "I move to keep things whole." The ten tracks of Wherever I Am I Am What Is Missing cling to this invisibility, of transient reality, of being defined by one's presence and passage in the external world. "'Cause a body was better than nobody," Fiedler sings in "Barefoot Blues," "And one seemed worse than two..."
The continuing tragedy of Laika's music is that it moves and shivers like some firelit ceremony, some spectacle filled with strange rhythms and fronted by an intoxicating siren who weeps her eternal sorrow into a bleak void beyond the liminality of the torchlight. You feel like you've stumbled upon some foreign and alien music but, as you listen to the undulating sound of Fiedler's voice and become captivated by the rhythms and programming, you realize that you know these songs. They're filled with loneliness; they're just the sound of lost souls running to stand still.
Not so different from you and I. "I remember smiling / Words designed to justify / It helps the sun is shining / On and on and on and on and oh." Laika's success on record is how they make loneliness and heartache seem less stark, less of an empty monochromatic world. Keep moving, the rhythms whisper, keep moving and the world still knows you are there. And, if you stay in motion, eventually you will find something. "Birds without wings out of the dust of dreams / Head out to sea seeking the stars."
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