Pitchfork

Carla Sciaky's voice can stop time. Not so much in the sense that she can make this 35-year-old song sound fresh-- which she certainly can-- but in the sense that time seems to stop whenever she's singing. Her voice is so clear and expressive that she always sounds lost in the moment, a spell which extends to the listener. On "Miles Before Sleeping", which she wrote and recorded when she was 18, Sciaky yearns for "my house, my room, my bed," inviting you into her interior world but savoring the hard journey.

"Miles Before Sleeping" is ultimately a song about touring, which is odd considering her band Propinquity rarely toured. Instead, they played primarily around Colorado during the early 1970s. In 1972, the group recorded a lone self-titled album, which languished in obscurity for decades before finally seeing reissue on Asterisk (a new imprint of the Numero Group, which included Sciaky's "And I a Fairy Tale Lady" on last year's Wayfaring Strangers: Ladies from the Canyon comp).

Propinquity's lush harmonies, lilting melodies, and dreamily pastoral folk-rock have lost none of their sway over years, as "Standing in the Doorway" attests. Sung by Pat Hubbard, one of Propinquity's four singer/songwriters, the song depicts two lovers' final farewell-- from the door to the sidewalk and down the road-- in what feels like real time: "Standing in the doorway with the screen closed, you smile at me with sadness in your eyes," Hubbard sings stoically. "I kiss you through the screen just like I've always done, back off two steps and then you say goodbye." That the song is only two minutes and eleven seconds long testifies to Hubbard's gift for lyrical compression and the band's talent for concise, but evocative, arrangements.