yellow ostrich

The focal point of Yellow Ostrich's magnificent debut The Mistress is Alex Schaaf's tender, pleading voice. It's reedy and childlike, and on The Mistress it gets looped and layered, stretched, manipulated; it's stacked up several high and, most often, it's used as an instrument, fleshing out the empty spaces in his bare, searching songs. Aside from a pulsing bass guitar, it's the only sound on "Hold On," a kaleidoscope of "ohs" spiraling around Schaaf's heartbroken opening: "Now that we've started, it's sad to see it end."

That's fitting: Schaaf is a secretary of the interior, and The Mistress, his stunning, fully-realized debut as Yellow Ostrich, is as personal a document as they come. The record, which Schaaf recorded by himself in his bedroom in Wisconsin (before moving to New York in 2010), came together quickly, all of it generating from a single central notion. "I had this idea of working with looped vocals," Schaaf says, "I wanted to use them not so much as a melodic thing, but as a strong, rhythmic element. Once I had that general concept, I wrote most of the songs in about a week."

Putting such deliberate emphasis on Schaaf's voice creates a sense of intimacy. You hear the songs on The Mistress the way he first heard them: as bare, hummed melodies floating around in the subconscious, with only a few instrumental hash marks holding them together -- a splotch of guitar here, a thunk of piano there. Schaaf's day job is digitizing old Super 8 home movies, and that's fitting -- there's a kind of yellowed nostalgia to The Mistress, dragged kicking and screaming into the modern age. The musical simplicity is echoed in the lyrics: the kinds of intimate confessions that get whispered from one person to another in the small hours of the morning.

Such intense focus on arranging is not exactly incidental. Schaaf is a graduate of Lawrence University's Conservatory of Music in Wisconsin, where he learned the ground rules of being in a band with local outfit The Chairs while recording sparer, quieter Yellow Ostrich songs on his own. As his years in school drew to a close, Schaaf knew he needed change. He moved to New York with The Mistress fully complete, and set about the task of transforming Yellow Ostrich from a solo project to a bona fide band. "When I got to New York, I contacted Michael [Tapper], because I'd seen him play before. I asked him, 'Hey, if you happen to know any drummers…,' but in the back of my mind, I was hoping it would be him." Michael had known bassist and horn player Jon Natchez from several different projects, and soon invited him to join the band as well. Three songs added to this version of The Mistress - new takes on old Yellow Ostrich songs "Bread" and "Fog," along with a different version of "Mary" – provide a tantalizing glimpse at where the trio may be heading.

But as much as the band has grown together over the course of the last 10 months, in the end, The Mistress is a product of Schaaf's vision, its songs centered on his vivid, often surreal fairy tales. "The idea of the "Mistress" is that it is something almost entirely built in your imagination - you have all of these vivid and intense feelings and ideas, but they are directed towards something that you know nothing about," Schaaf explains. "You just create an image in your head of what you think perfection is, and you project that image onto your future or onto your everyday life, and never try and see the whole picture." Indeed, as the songs progress, that darker undercurrent slowly surfaces. "A lot of the songs came from that feeling of blind imagination, and the things that happen when that imagination clashes with your actual everyday life."

The songs on The Mistress exist within that push-and-pull – the allure of blind fantasy chased by the bitter sting of reality. Nowhere is this more apparent than in "Mary," a song that begins with optimism and encouragement but crests on a sudden, startling note of despair: "Mary, you are doing drugs -- don't you think we know?" Schaaf sings, crestfallen. The confrontation is followed by a crushing silence, before Schaaf's voice -- all six harmonizing iterations of it -- returns, a soothing cascade of sound. He sings only a single open syllable, but the meaning is clear: Schaaf's intention is not to judge -- it's to comfort.