Can You Hear Me See Me Now? by Quinn Marston

Author

By Mary Leary

Publish Date

Dec. 22, 2010

Textured, moderately echoed/fuzzed guitar meshes with Quinn's I-have-a-caramel-in-my-mouth vocals and wide-(NYC)-eyed intonations irresistibly. Yeah, it sounds kinda ’90s, but in a "I miss the verve and innocence we took for granted" way. Liz Phair's thoughts are completed: juicy acoustics rise to rock crescendos, guitar hogs the driver's seat; nursery room chimes are met by a sailor-suit beat (okay, not so Phair-ish). Marston's as self-absorbed as Ms. Phair, she's just more absorbing. "I Can Let It Go" sprinkles salt over the caramel; nearly bat-wing quirky as Coco Rosie.

Girl knows how to balance the two-left-shoe thing with the simplistic ("Raincoat"). The hooks on "So High" produce such euphoria, I don't care whether the balance is contrived or intuitive. This here's some upscale production of instrumentation digging into plump hooks and canny dynamics. Well, involvement by Tom Beaujour (Nada Surf) and Tim Fohljahn (Cat Power, Thurston Moore) couldn't have hurt — that tells you something, now, doesn't it? Minute I start to think "but," behind a relatively unspectacular or too-much-like-something-else something, it swells into something that has me nodding along, in a way not too far from Dinosaur Jr./Teenage Fanclub. The eight tunes' average duration is two minutes and change, a rock-minimalist feat.

Album: Can You Hear Me See Me Now? (2010)
Artist: Quinn Marston
Label: Ernest Jenning Record Co.
Songs: (1) Articulation (2) Electrical One (3) Can You Hear Me See Me Now? (4) I Can Let It Go (5) Raincoat (6) So High (7) The Fish (8) You May Not Have Seen