Linda Perhacs – Parallelograms (Sunbeam)
To put it as bluntly as possible, I’m really mad at myself that I bought this album. I really should know better by now than to buy into the whole record collector mystique that builds up around anybody who put out a limited album forty years ago then disappeared into obscurity, only to be dragged out of the shadows by the blogosphere. I’ll admit I’m a sucker for a good back story, but Linda Perhacs’s isn’t even that great–just a fairly standard tale of an average-at-best folkie who recorded a few waifish tunes towards the tail end of the first hippie era then dropped off the map to commune with the forests.
One might immediately make a comparison with Vashti Bunyan, not only in the nearly parallel life story but in many of the music’s sonic signatures. But where Bunyan’s better moments survive on a waifish delicacy, a fragility so effortless and pronounced that you might fear her voice might shatter if you listen hard enough, Perhacs trades on a forced hush which comes off sedated rather than sedate, as if she might betray the “good vibes” she so eagerly hoped to convey if she raised her voice at all. There are occasional moments with potential, most notably the studio trickery at work in the title track, but for the most part this is a dated relic, a time capsule so toothless that it makes Joni Mitchell sound like Slayer in comparison. It’s great that so many otherwise unheralded would-be classics are digging their way up from obscurity’s interment, but Parallelograms demonstrates that while many albums were lost to history unjustifiably, some deserved their fate.