Barbara Manning’s music is difficult to pigeonhole; it’s more indie-pop than folk, but her breezy, matter-of-fact phrasings send you searching outside the rock canon for comparison. Over a 13-year career, solo and with bands such as World Of Pooh and SF Seals, she has developed a softly avant garde style, filtering an eclectic bundle of covers and originals through a musical prism that renders them beautifully sensible, catchy and heartrending, all at once.
1212, Manning’s first solo outing since 1992, shows her at her best. Key to the disc’s excellent musicianship is Manning’s collaboration with Joey Burns and John Convertino of Giant Sand and Calexico, whose multi-instrumental backup is typically innovative and free of grandstanding. While Manning’s discs as leader of the SF Seals sometimes strained for risky touches, her latest feels organic, its plainness and quirkiness driven by the compositions.
Witness “The Arsonist Story”, the disc’s opening track. An 18-minute song-suite about a firebug could be a template for prog-rock bombast, but in Manning’s hands, the mini-opera form delivers an emotionally hefty cluster of melodic pop songs, tragic and playful, linked by fluid touches like “Evil Plays Piano” and a gorgeously recorded conflagration. Likewise, the four other originals on 1212 add more quality tunes to Manning’s catalog, which, despite her participation in eight LPs, is as tiny as it is wonderful. “Isn’t Lonely Lovely?”, a wistful tale that could easily be transplanted to a cocktail lounge, is a standout.
Yes, Manning does a lot of covers, but while some performers use other peoples’ songs to pad an undeveloped musical identity, the covers on 1212 (by the likes of Richard Thompson, The Bevis Frond, and Neu) complement her originals, tapping into her blackly humorous and fatalistic worldview. Manning commandeers the soul of songs such as “Marcus Leid” and “Rickity Tikity Tin” (which recount the adventures of Joan of Arc and a petite murderess, respectively) by supplying a subtle emotional center that the originals lacked. Interpreter or auteur, Manning shines either way.
