Shana Cleveland – ‘Manzanita’ album review
Music is one of the last refuges in a world that seems to be constantly locked in despair, with bad news coming from all angles. Recently, we’ve seen a host of musicians deliver great works, with Shana Cleveland, another artist, taking up the mantle. The La Luz frontwoman returns with her new solo album Manzanita. An enchanting aural experience, the surrounding real-life problems humans have created for themselves are nowhere to be seen here. It’s a sanctuary away from all the extraneous noise.
A deeply personal album with a hefty dose of enticing magical realism poured into it, despite its otherworldy essence, Manzanita is also profoundly natural-sounding. Manzanita is the common name for a small evergreen tree with strong medicinal properties endemic to California, the state Cleveland calls home – a far cry away from her native Michigan, and the LP stays true to the source. Medicinal is the perfect word to describe the quality of the La Luz frontwoman’s new solo album.
She draws on the humbling natural beauty of her home state, the new experience of motherhood, and Californian music and literature to create a body of work that sounds both familiar and individualistic. “This is a supernatural love album set in the California wilderness,” Cleveland explains, which is certainly one way of looking at it. The intense love for her son provides a coursing river of emotion from which the estuaries of Cleveland’s expression derives. However, Manzanita is not overly sentimental. It’s primal, with themes of motherhood almost animalistic at points, indicative of the natural world’s overarching influence on it. After all, when making the album, giving birth to her son made her realise that no one is separate from nature.
“I think of this as a Springtime record,” Cleveland also says. “In California, Spring is the season when nature comes inside. The house is suddenly full of weird bugs. Everything is blindingly in bloom.” With side A written while still pregnant and side B, after the birth, she creates an authentic feeling of spring-like growth across the 14 tracks whilst not forgoing any of the abstract Americana that she does so well.
The album kicks off with the instantly immersive ‘A Ghost’. Cleveland’s moody, Western-style acoustic pulls you in. Then, the shaker, reverb-drenched cymbals and the siren-like register of her vocals construct it as a psychedelic lullaby, a sensation later revisited on the short instrumental, ‘Light on the Water’. Augmenting proceedings is the Mellotron, which delivers a solo in the middle and harks back to the psychedelia of 1960s California and produces a range of pastoral mental portraits, including that of Pan and his pipes.
Following the brief interlude, ‘Bloom’, the orchestral pop brilliance of ‘Faces in the Firelight’ fades in. Another relaxed piece with an earworm of a string melody, Cleveland once again delivers a stunning vocal tune, which drops out at one point, replaced by the moving drone of the double bass. Marrying her experience of being pregnant with unfettered love for her life partner Will Sprott, she sings: “Faces in the firelight/ A blooming room inside the night/ Do you love me like I do you?”.
Creating an atmosphere is something that Manzanita does very well. ‘Sherriff of the Salton Sea’ is one of the best examples of this triumph. It commences with the repeated finger-picking of the acoustic guitar before it gives way to a hypnotic, Spanish-inflected solo manoeuvre that denotes Cleveland’s artistic connection to psychedelia and California. ‘Quick Winter Sun’, also opens with one of the musician’s best moments on the guitar, a picked flourish that elicits more visions of The Golden State’s many striking vistas.
Elsewhere, ‘Mayonnaise’ is a standout, with the eerie slide guitar and piano linking up to create the sort of sound you’d expect at a 19th-century music hall before a macabre tale was spun. It also features a reference to the acclaimed author Richard Brautigan and his famous Big Sur. The following line sums up her connection to the state: “Now I am a Californian/ I never wanna leave the state again… I’ll write a thousand songs before I’m done.”
A personal highlight is ‘Evil Eye’. On the track, Cleveland ramps up the atmosphere to the most palpable level found on Manzanita. Another masterclass in finger-picking, accentuated by slides? Check. The rumbling of the bass linking up with the gallop of the brushed snare? Check. One hell of a vocal melody? Check. A reference to the dark side of the supernatural? It courses throughout. A wholly spellbinding piece, it sounds like it should be able to lift you from your seat into the air in a Dario Argento-like ritual.
A perfect springtime album. As the days are growing longer and the sun is starting to show itself once again, Manzanita is well worth delving into.
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