Carissa’s Wierd
Songs About Leaving
(Barsuk, 2002)

In the summer of 2003, not long before their abrupt parting of ways, Carissa’s Wierd (misspelling intentional) played a show at Omaha’s Sokol Underground. In the way such things often happen, I found myself attending a party later on that evening at the house where the band was crashing. What I recall most from that night—a night of beer in plastic cups and a hot July rain falling in the street outside—was sitting on the arm of a sofa in a noisy living room and having a conversation with the band’s vocalist, Jenn Ghetto.

To be fair, it was really Jenn Ghetto having a conversation with me. She did most of the talking, giving me the overwhelming impression that she needed someone to just shut up and listen for a second, and so that’s what I did. And because I didn’t have anything meaningful to contribute, as I so rarely do in such situations, I offered what we all offer when we want to make someone feel better: “I understand how you feel.”

It was at that point that she gave me a long look, containing the most poignant mixture of weariness and patience I’ve ever seen on anyone’s face, and replied simply, “I don’t think you do.”

Four years later, I find myself pulling out my old copy of what was perhaps the group’s most successful album, 2002’s Songs About Leaving. And after a few more times through what is, really, an underground masterpiece, I’m coming to realize that Jenn Ghetto’s words to me that night are a perfect explanation for what’s behind the incredible lure of this all-too-short-lived band. The eternal disconnect between people, the idea that two individuals can never feel the exact same thing, and the overwhelming sense of loneliness that comes with that realization. That’s what floats through every hushed harmony and dissonant note of this haunting album.

Recorded and mixed with Chris Walla (of Death Cab for Cutie fame) Songs About Leaving was the last of Carissa’s Wierd’s three studio albums. The first two, Ugly but Honest in 2000 and You Should Be at Home Here in 2001, were both successful among a few passionate fans, particularly in the group’s native Pacific Northwest, but it was with Songs About Leaving that Carissa’s Wierd created their most astounding work.

The key to this album lies mainly in its very moodiness; to turn on Songs About Leaving means to turn the lights out on a sunny afternoon and rejoice in rainy twilight. The orchestral melodies, mellow to the point of sweetness, form almost overwhelmingly beautiful songs, littered with symbolist lyrics and tangible shreds of raw emotion. In the track “September Come Take This Heart Away”, the lyric is a painfully practical description of the feeling of loss: “All of these windows bring in the cold air / I hope you have a coat to keep you warm / Warmer than those last words we spoke, warmer than the last words we said / I’m sure the wind blows gently on you now / I hope that nothing will ever remind you of me.”

Throughout the album, the vocals supplied by the main creative forces, Ghetto and Mat Brooke, are strong enough to uphold the sound yet gentle enough to remind the listener of low-budget reel to reels and emotional confessions taking place in basements. Ghetto’s girlish warble is timid and heartbreakingly loose in all the right places, with prominent consonants as intimate whispers, and clear notes stretching like the morning after. Brooke chimes in softly, dispassionately, like the voice on the phone telling you that you shouldn’t let last night’s little incident ruin your friendship. The two come together to sing the complicated duet that opens the album, “You Should be Hated Here.” The song is dissonant perfection, the dissolution of a relationship in song, a building and release of tension, a blame that closes with a softly chanted refrain where the voices at last lie together: “And it all comes down to composure that’s been lost.”

Throughout Songs About Leaving, and indeed their entire career, the sound of Carissa’s Wierd is self-enclosed, a time capsule, a window backwards into something lost. It might conjure up a rainy night in Omaha, a dark bedroom on a quiet afternoon, or the sound of a car backing down the driveway for the last time. Of course, despite all of these themes of disconnection and ending, the members of Carissa’s Weird are still very much alive in the music world. Jenn Ghetto now performs under the moniker S, while Mat Brooke and Ben Bridwell formed Band of Horses, which Brooke recently left in order to begin a band called Grand Archives, whose first tracks appeared online in March of 2007.

These facts help. It’s hard to remember sometimes that the members of Carissa’s Wierd didn’t die in some tragic accident after the recording of their final work. Fans, including me, certainly tend to mourn them as such. But that’s not to say that the band’s recordings sound especially tragic. Audibly intimate, humming with orchestral layers, their music lacks the underlying hint of looming fate that simmers beneath, say, every syllable ever breathed by Jeff Buckley. Instead, what comes through is a sort of quiet acceptance of the pending conclusion; everything has to end sometime. And that’s something we all understand.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]

Watch: “Sympathy Bush” [at YouTube]

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