IDA
LOVERS PRAYERS
POLYVINYL
WORDS: JAY LOWE

Ida’s seventh full-length album, Lovers Prayers, invokes all the tranquility of a quiet night in the Catskill Mountains. Not surprising, since Ida recorded it in the home studio of Levon Helm, the drummer from The Band, who lives in the Catskills. Thanks to the surroundings, the New York City outfit abandoned their “traditional studio perfectionism” and spent two years spontaneously writing and recording their most dynamic album to date.

A typical track from Lovers Prayers is titled “The Love Below”, although it couldn’t be more unlike from Andre 3000’s ice cold 2003 release. It starts simply and grows organically from a single bowed violin string, while a single, constant guitar chord drives the song forward through harmonic layers that branch out like a tree’s. Choral climbs and falls, vibrant bass and yet more melodic guitar bloom into an ample and satisfying harmonic fullness.

Each song is painted with harmonizing voices and slow, lethargic-yet-not-quite-melancholy melodies. Seemingly independent instrumental voices weave in and out of each other like birds returning north for the summer -- never interfering with one another, yet all clearly part of a greater, complex whole. Their rhythm section is slow and steady (when it’s there at all), and in fact, most songs’ rhythmic drive is a single melodic acoustic guitar line, fleshed out by soft, mellifluous vocals, violin and piano. The faint, bowed strings add a welcome warmth to each song. Each composition echoes natural and unrefined, and what sounds like field recordings of a forest at night even become part of the music at times.

Lyrical themes touch on sorrow of loves lost and loves just out of reach. The mood for most songs is optimistic, however, as though past regrets are tempered by the earned knowledge that sorrow is fleeting, just as happiness is. Lovers Prayers is a journey into one’s past punctuated by 20/20 hindsight, without the echo of nostalgia the next day.