A Review of Jenny Dalton's Rusalka's Umbrella

Lately we've been quite interested in Jenny Dalton, whose music and lyrics remind us of a young Joni Mitchell; although her lyrics are a bit more oblique than Joni's. In interviews Jenny has said that her songs are more like what she remembers of dreams than actual events in her life... Maybe this is why, so many years ago, Bob Dylan labeled some of his songs as dreams.

With this in mind, here is a re-print of a review published on September 24, 2008 in the Twin Cities Daily Planet. The review -- abridged here -- was written by Jay Gabler, the Daily Planet's arts editor.

MUSIC NOTE: Babushka, babushka... Rusalka?

It grew on me. It took a few days of driving around the Twin Cities listening to Jenny Dalton's new album Rusalka's Umbrella, but it finally got under my skin.

It's a concept album and the concept is water. The songs (and accompanying book) are inspired, Dalton's web site notes, by "a collage of influences including Twin Peaks, the Morton Salt Girl, The Shipping News, ghosts, Memoirs of a Geisha, folktales, The Fall by Albert Camus, the 35W bridge collapse, mermaids and more." I don't think I caught all that on the record, but nor did I ever figure out... what the hell happened to Billy Shears.

There's an aptly Eastern European tint to a couple of the songs (in Slavic folklore, a rusalka is a water spirit)... Over Stingesquely decorous arrangements, Dalton lilts like Joni Mitchell with the trilling of Rs and swallowed vocals of the Cranberries' Dolores O'Riordan. Taken as a package, though, the nearest point of reference is the iconoclastic siren Kate Bush -- perhaps the only other living artist who could put such genuine feeling into lyrics like "Six points on a snowflake, eight arrows on a compass/My brother with a host family playing drums for the Norwegians." Move along, folks, move along -- it's all part of the concept.

If the album is a little perplexing at first, by the third or fourth listen it does cohere, and it's well programmed to sweep the listener from the ominous opener "Better Known Vacancy" to the piano-pounding boogie "The Turn and the River" into the strange realms of the album's heart, climaxing with the elegant ballad "Dear Paul" and the surging "Puddle Jump" before depositing us back among "The Snow Mazes of Norway."

I'm sorry I missed the album release show, where the music was dramatized. I'm sure the interpretation wasn't entirely literal... It occurs to me that from the album's lyrics you could assemble an alternate universe Village People: the pirate, the Viking, the test pilot, the surfer, and the sheriff.