Pitchfork

Low, gentle, and mellifluous, Edith Frost's voice sounds as if it's inside of your head. She's so closely mic'd on this collection of demos-- available for as a free download at Comfort Stand-- that her vocals take up your entire sensory field. It's similar to the experience of standing too close to a Barnett Newman painting and seeing only the color red sporadically interrupted by thin verticals of yellow and blue. Likewise, on Demos, Frost's voice seems to push every other sound-- acoustic guitar, soft keyboards, ambient noises both intentional and accidental-- to the auditory margins.

Demos collects early versions of songs that originally appeared on Frost's three Drag City albums-- Calling Over Time, Telescopic, and Wonder Wonder-- along with covers of Floyd Tillman's "I Get the Craziest Feeling" and Lefty Frizzell's "Look What Thoughts Will Do". The demos are unadorned and unfussy, without the sometimes distracting presence of the musicians who typically grace Frost's albums. This casual setting could be unflattering for lesser singers-- resulting in a strictly fans-only release-- but here it magnifies Frost's strengths. She sounds more relaxed and comfortable, and her songwriting (which I'd previously dismissed as weak) comes across as more direct and affectingly personal.

"One Chord Complaint" draws a great deal from a single guitar chord that repeats under her vocals, and the effect is eerily hypnotic-- an airiness reminiscent of Julee Cruise's work for David Lynch. "Walk on the Fire" includes street noise, children's squeals, and what sounds like someone walking on Bubble Wrap, but these sound effects are distracting and only weakly reinforce the tone conveyed by Frost's voice, lyrics, and guitar.

This stripped-down approach offers some insight into Frost's creative process: Specifically, how she develops a song from its early phase through to its recording. The version of "Cars and Parties" on Wonder Wonder has a lovely long-distance swing to it thanks to the skipping snare drum and chiming guitar; on Demos, the song lacks that easy motion but it sounds more steeped in homesickness.

A similar trade-off occurs with "Wonder Wonder": On the album which shares its name, the song features ragtag instrumentation but on the demo the tempo is slowed and the main melody is held together by a simple keyboard. The newly released version has an off-the-cuff introspectiveness that was traded for the original's sense of wide-eyed wonder. It's the same song by the same singer, yet the delivery and accompaniment subtly shade the meaning.

The pair of covers only strengthen the revelation that all Frost needs to put her songs across is her voice and maybe a guitar. Frost may sound nothing like the loser of Frizzell's "Look What Thoughts Will Do", but neither that selection nor the Tillman cover seems misguided or ill-advised. She performs each track as a delicate blues number with the accompaniment of Pinetop Seven's Ryan Hembrey, Dirty Three's Jim White, and Califone's Jim Becker, and yet compared to the rougher demos these covers sound relatively featureless and broad. They suffer once Frost's voice is pushed from the extreme foreground. Although her studio work often sounds spare, Demos is even more so and, ironically, this makes these tracks all the more overwhelming.