The vocalists in the experimental choral group Roomful of Teeth can sing just about anything. They tested out yodeling, Tuvan-inspired throat singing and modernist classical traditions on their Grammy-winning debut album from 2012. The singers are so outside the box that for them to jump into it, on their new album Elevator Songs is, in itself, practically an act of the avant-garde.
What they've jumped into is a collaboration with the gifted songwriter Gabriel Kahane, who has written a suite of songs especially for the group that nudge the singers towards the edges of their comfort zones. In order to test an ensemble accustomed to the unconventional, the music leans heavily towards pop. Each song was written for an individual voice in the ensemble to sing solo, while the rest provide expressive backup.
Elevator Songs is a high concept album. The elevator in question is a feature of an imaginary, multidimensional hotel. It takes us through time and space, stopping on floors to meet a collection of guests, some troubled, others merely caught up in their complicated lives. Think The White Lotus meets Everything Everywhere All at Once. The songs are built on melodies that pop, and they go down easy, but the vivid portraits they paint linger.
Kahane, an expressive vocalist himself, sings the opening and closing tracks on the album, acting as a kind of metaphysical doorman. He also provides keys and guitar. "To be honest, this hotel is kind of creepy. The ice machine is speaking in tongues," he chants in the prologue, escorting us into the elevator, up to room 813 and the song "St. Vincent's Hospital."
Here we are transported to the late 1980s. A man is alone in his room with its bible and digital clock, "but not one ballpoint pen." He's drafting a eulogy for an AIDS victim. "Hey, this isn't the first time I've done it, making a map of sorrow in my head," sings Teeth member Steven Bradshaw in an urgent, brightly polished tenor voice.
There's room for a wide range of emotion in Kahane's hotel. In room 1212, a U.S. soldier deals with flashes of PTSD in the song "Not even the Dead," Mingjia Chen's velvety soprano growing increasingly feverish. Down in the lobby bar, a woman contemplates her past, her gin and perhaps a divorce. "Does anyone ever learn the temperature where memory burns," Esteli Gomez sings in an incandescent performance, while Teeth members, in tiny voices, mumble memories beneath.
There are humorous stops on the ride. In room 1832 ("Valise") we encounter a self-absorbed fashionista health guru in the middle of recording a podcast, advising his listeners on everything from "capsule wardrobes" to how to combat "climate grief while flying." Jodie Landau's performance is terrifically tongue-in-cheek, while the refrain (Put it in my valise / Put it in my black bag / Put it in my Cucinelli knapsack), sung by the rest of the Teeth, is supremely addictive.
Kahane is one of today's most insightful and witty wordsmiths. He once used posts from Craigslist to create Schubert-styled lieder. He also boarded an Amtrak train, without his phone or internet connection, for a two-week journey across America, meeting passengers (singing with some of them) and turning his travel diary into a fascinating album.
Over at the hotel's fitness center, Kahane has crafted a mock operatic scene for a skeezy hot tub lurker. Bass-baritone Thann Scoggin sings ridiculous lines ("I slip into the water and chill the f*** out") in an appropriately operatic vibrato.
Gabriel Kahane himself has the last word on the album, back in the elevator, in the song "All That is Solid." He assumes a ghostly presence — suggesting that he has always been here, measuring the pains and desires of the hotel's guests, whose lives reflect nothing less than our own.
In an era when we tend to emphasize singles — if not 10-second clips — over albums, I welcome the immersive experience of Elevator Songs. But even if you don't buy the conceit, or just want to cherry pick, the album offers poignant depictions of our emotionally messy lives in arresting, bespoke performances by Roomful of Teeth, a group that proves it can wrap its individual and collective voices around any music and any concept.
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