Pitchfork

It's been three years since Ida's last album, Heart Like a River, during which time the core trio of Daniel Littleton, Elizabeth Mitchell, and Karla Schickele holed up at Levon Helm's home studio in Woodstock, New York, to record their follow-up and eighth album, Lovers Prayers. Despite the famous scenery and the impressive list of collaborators-- Michael Hurley, Tara Jane O'Neil, and Warn Defever of His Name Is Alive-- Ida haven't changed their sound, just refined it, as "The Killers, 1964" ably shows.

This isn't a murder ballad, as the title might suggest, but a movie ballad. In their typically crystalline harmonies, the trio sings about the film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's short story "The Killers"-- not the 1946 version with Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner, but the (duh) 1964 version starring Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson (Ronald Reagan plays a duplicitous villain, a part he'd perfect later in his career). Over swelling strings that sound like the kernel of an Aaron Copeland overture, Ida alternately address director Don Siegel ("You couldn't have known when you shot that scene/ That it would live on forever in the dead light of the late-night TV screen") and doomed hitman Marvin ("You punched Ronald Reagan right in the face"). In doing so, the band twists the characters' predicament into a resonant existential question: "Who are the killers that we work for? Are they so far above us or behind every door?"

MP3:> Ida: "The Killers"
[from Lovers Prayers; due 01/29/08 from Polyvinyl]