Mark Pagani, the leader of Sister Sadie’s Foundry, may be based in New Haven — he’s a professor of geology and geophysics and the director of Yale’s Climate and Energy Institute — but his music sounds like it comes from somewhere drier and dustier. West Texas, maybe. Arizona. New Mexico. Somewhere with a horizon much farther away than they ever get in Connecticut.
“I took a long drive / Past the edge of town. / A long drive / With the window down,” Pagani sings on “Coming Up For Air,” one of the standout tracks on the uniformly strong Anthropomorphic, which the group released last month. By then James Rohr’s snarling organ has already established the tone, Michael Powers’s electric guitar twanged out a melody tinged with dissonance. Andy Plaisted’s drums and Jay Feinstein’s bass are steady, insistent, almost subterranean. But all of it swirls around Pagani’s voice, a strong, raspy instrument in itself, and builds like a lazy dust devil. The first chorus offers just a hint of catharsis, a sense of release that keeps growing into an aching howl. Michela Proto’s gritty vocal joins Pagani’s, letting him hit the edge of his own voice. “Your papa’s lost, you’re papa’s lost,” he sings. “But sometimes found.”
“Coming Up For Air” shows Sister Sadie’s Foundry as an outfit playing about as well as a band plays together. It’s organic but thoughtful, well-staged and still vibey as anything, full of details to find on repeated listens — a flourish of a piano here, a tasty phrase from the guitar there, some stealthy syncopation on the drums, a certain break in Pagani’s voice at the beginnings of certain words that makes something break a little in us, too.
Anthropomorphic ranges farther than the red desert in “Coming Up For Air.” A muscular baritone sax from Melanie Howell gives the strut of “Loved” an extra bluesy weight. “Siren” shows that the band can play pretty, with some atmospheric work from Plaisted and Powers giving space for stacks of vocals. “Voodoo Doll,” the album’s closer, shifts straight into R&B, complete with horn section from Keiichi Hashimoto and Kit Buckley.
But much of the album keeps circling back to that dark, arid musical landscape in “Coming Up For Air,” and that’s not a bad thing at all. Richard Reed’s accordion fleshes out the skeleton of “Skull and Bones,” which grooves at its own languid pace, a man walking through dry heat at dusk. The stompers “Wild Blue Yonder” and “Mystery” are made to be played on an AM radio while doing 80 on the highway toward El Paso. Musically and lyrically, the songs speak of searching, of discovery, of freedom. But of mortality, too.
At the end of “Coming Up For Air,” the dust settles again. “I took a long drive,” Pagani sings again. “Past the edge of town. / A long drive / I pushed the pedal down.” He lets us follow for the next hundred yards, and then pulls away, to a horizon farther than we can see.
