If Tasseomancy's last album, 2015's Palm Wine Revisited, was a lush and mysterious landscape, their latest work focuses in on a much smaller picture. Do Easy is witchery on a more minute scale, a far more domestic weirdness. Using the full range of their expressive voices, Romy and Sari Lightman and their band conjure up references to musician, books and films, as though going through a collection.
The esoteric lyrical subjects, seemingly random instrumentation (dreamy bebop saxophone from nowhere, anyone?) and arrangements seem cobbled together, a serendipitous jumble of mismatched sounds. The result is like picking your way through a house stuffed with brilliant clutter, or reading a story told only through shelf contents, and realising that it's all a deliberate assemblage.
The album's central piece, the title song, is inspired a 1972 William S. Burroughs essay. Like a strung-out mystic Marie Kondo, Burroughs described a ritualistic, self-hypnotic re-wiring of one's habits, until grace and perfect personal order were as natural as breathing. Do Easy, the album, makes the magical mundane, and vice-versa.
(Outside Music / Hand Drawn Dracula)The esoteric lyrical subjects, seemingly random instrumentation (dreamy bebop saxophone from nowhere, anyone?) and arrangements seem cobbled together, a serendipitous jumble of mismatched sounds. The result is like picking your way through a house stuffed with brilliant clutter, or reading a story told only through shelf contents, and realising that it's all a deliberate assemblage.
The album's central piece, the title song, is inspired a 1972 William S. Burroughs essay. Like a strung-out mystic Marie Kondo, Burroughs described a ritualistic, self-hypnotic re-wiring of one's habits, until grace and perfect personal order were as natural as breathing. Do Easy, the album, makes the magical mundane, and vice-versa.