Poetry & prose combine: Lady Lamb the Beekeeper’s “After”

by Scott Wilson

The young Aly Spaltro, now called Lady Lamb the Beekeeper, from Portland, Maine, writes the kind of music that makes you feel cultured by just listening to it. Thick with poetry and prose, she may become the premier singer-songwriter of her generation.

Many of the songs on her latest full album, After, have a lyrical quality that verges on the essayistic. From the first track, “Billions of Eyes”, we get, “The kitchen in this new place has a window, yeah, you can grow basil on the sill…maybe” which, when put in context with the rest of the song, speaks to the life and aspirations of a twenty-something, interested in assuming the affectations of the modern urbanite, though not fully buying in. That specific song, “Billions of Eyes”, is part poem on the nature of modern life, and part commentary on one’s specific role in the world. The lyrics of that and many of her other songs can be pulled out individually to form cohesive ideas, but as a whole they create a dynamic motif, with many avenues of subtle implication the savvy listener can suss out through repetition. Lady Lamb packs stanzas with meaning, something that people who listen to songs on vinyl, who tend to listen to the same four to six tracks over and over because they’re too lazy to flip the record, will appreciate.

That’s not to say that every song is a lyrical bloodbath. In the track “Violet Clementine” she is speaking for maybe eighty percent of the song’s length, but only says three phrases. To grasp meaning from this song, then, one has to pay attention to her tone – not the lyrics, which kind of wash into nonsense the more they’re repeated. Her voice goes from intense staccato to slurred and breathless as the song progresses, implying resignation and some kind of invisible, inevitable negativity. But midway through the song there’s a changeup and the intensity returns, redoubled in 2/4 time. The room for metaphorical interpretation is boundless with this song, despite her limited use of lyrics.

Something a lot of people have a hard time getting over is the artist’s name, “Lady Lamb the Beekeeper”. It’s a little too cute, twee even, some would say. My response to that is, well, yes, on the verbal level and on press releases her name is an eye-roller. But in relation to her iconography it makes sense: on her website you see the name written in dripping blood, which is funny, but also a clever way of showing the dichotomy in her music between the sweet and the bold. If you delve into the background of the artist, you see that the name represents a dream she had, and, in fact, a lot of her songs relate to somnolence. So, there you go.

After is an album with a split personality. The first six songs are, for lack of a better term, rock. They’re boisterous and upbeat, more or less. The second half are the sad songs: lots of “D minor cords”. I’m guessing this was done for logistic reasons since After was made to be sold as a record with two sides, and sometimes a person wants to listen to one kind of music over another. Still, After is varied, Lady Lamb experiments with different effects and instruments in almost every song, keeping the listener from becoming bored. Though saying this is a rock-solid album, from start to finish, might be a little too obliging. Listening to the album in order, from first to last, there are some spots where it drags. The melancholy in some of the songs overtakes the others, and can put a person in a certain mood. A predisposition for the melodramatic is an affliction of many folk rockers these days and is something Lady Lamb might want to tone down, if she’s after a broader appeal. Luckily, the sadder songs, like “Milk Duds”, tend to be lumped together on the second half. This attention to album dynamics is something that sets Lady Lamb in an advanced category, especially amongst her peers that play similar music.

After is set for release in March. You can get it in digital, but buy the vinyl if you can.