Have you ever had one of those moments where you have no choice butt to simply stop, stare and marvel at your luck? An example would be driving late on an icy winter night, losing control of your car and doing a 720-degree spin across three lanes of highway only to skid unstruck to a stop on the soft shoulder. And, if that wasn't enough, you then discover that you have a front row seat to witness the same thing happen to the guy behind you except he gets hit by the eighteen-wheeler behind him. It’s an ugly scene, but you still have to laugh. Maybe it’s the adrenaline or maybe it’s the tension of evading a potentially disastrous situation falling away, but it’s impossible to not have a little giggle and att the realization that you just lived through something remarkable that's unlikely to happen the same way twice. Sometimes a near miss can be the biggest hit of your day and that’s the kind of sensation that washes over listeners from the moment they press play on A Thousand Shark’s Teeth.
From the tenuous initial guitar arpeggios and string swell of “Inside A Boy,” a feeling of apprehensive excitement will build in the pit of even the most fashionably jaded listener’s stomach and it never really goes away throughout the duration of the album because, frankly, singer/songwriter Shara Worden never lets it sit outside of the primary focus of each song. Between Worden’s own breathtaking, classically trained vocals and the enormous instrumental palette set up by Rob Moose behind her, A Thousand Shark’s Teeth presents the idea of rock instrumentation and ideas as a classical form. While string and horn sections do appear along with guitars, bass and rock drums, the entire melange is set up to orchestrate brief movements of classicism with verse/chorus/verse structures. It’s actually amazing to hear it work because it’s totally unlike anything else in popular song.
Each of this album’s eleven tracks is remarkably short (an average of four minutes or less) for the amount of ground that each covers. Songs like “From The Top Of The World,” “Inside A Boy” and “Black & Costaud” all run a gamut of emotional states and colors in spite of their brevity, possibly because they’re so methodical in their pacing and possibly because Worden tries on and amalgamates so many sounds at once. Without simply name-dropping, the singer is able to encapsulate the woe of Edith Piaf and Billie Holiday, the regal grandeur of Bjork and Shirley Bassey and the tortured melancholy of Beth Gibbons and Shara Nelson (sometimes all in one song) effortlessly.
Now having set a rate of releasing new material at a new album per year for three years running, My Brightest Diamond has something to prove. Three records in and the band has (this is going to sound trite) covered a decent cross section of human emotion without actually making listeners believe that any of it isn’t just a grand production orchestrated by a couple of wildly talented musicians. The fourth wall is the only undiscovered country left; if they can make listeners believe the feelings are more than just a dramatic impersonation of humanity – if both the band and audience can feel the same thing at the same time – My Brightest Diamond will have committed the incredible. If they can do that, they may change the public’s perception of the medium in which the band resides and force them to look on pop as a high art form.
For more information, go to htttp://www.mybrightestdiamond.com and http://www.myspace.com/mybrightestdiamond
