Music |
Markéta Irglová
By
Published: Dec 06, 2011
Category:
Rock
Guest Butler Ron Fried produces TV, writes really crisp novels (like Christmas in Paris, 2002), knows everything about Balzac and is unspeakably nice. Thank God he can’t compete at Olympic-level figure skating, or he would be insufferable.
“No seats! Standing-room only?”
Thus went my plaintive interior monologue as I entered the Bowery Ballroom. It was almost my bedtime, my bones ached, and I was alone because my wife was home with a cold.
I had dragged my solitary middle-aged butt down to Delancey Street to see the singer/songwriter Markéta Irglová, co-star of the hit indie film Once. I might have been the oldest person present, the least equipped to stand comfortably for a couple of hours. But I needn’t have worried because — thanks to the luminous 23-year-old Irglová — the room would soon be levitating with youthful, positive energy, a fine tonic for aging bones.
The occasion for Irglová’s New York appearance was the release of her solo album, “Anar.” I say “solo,” but Irglová seems to thrive on collaboration. She worked on the songs for “Once” with her co-star Glen Hansard, the front man of the Irish rock group The Frames, and they won a best song Oscar for “Falling Slowly.” They collaborated again on “The Swell Season,” a follow-up album filled with more heartfelt tales of young love gone more wrong than right. Listening to their work together I always think: Yeah, that’s what love felt like back when I was that age. I remember that.
At a Swell Season concert, Hansard — a musical dynamo of almost Springsteenian energy — tends to dominate with tour de force solos and funny, discursive monologues. Irglová, a Czech-born, classically trained pianist, possesses a quieter gift, best suited to an intimate setting like the Bowery Ballroom. When she took the stage with her band, it was very much a family affair. Rob Bochnik from The Frames and Swell Season was on guitar. On bass was Tim Iseler, the producer and engineer of “Anar,” and also Irglová’s husband. At center stage was her close friend Aida Shahghasemi, an Iranian singer and percussionist whom Irglová, now a New York resident, met at an arts space in Brooklyn. [To buy the CD of “Anar” from Amazon, click here. For the MP3 download, click here.]
Shahghasemi held aloft what looked like an immense tambourine. It was actually a Daf, a traditional Persian frame drum. Shahghasemi, who harmonizes beautifully with Irglová on Anar, produces an astonishing wall of percussion from her one, hand-held instrument — so much so that as I stood off to the side of the stage, I wondered if there wasn’t a full drum kit in the corner where I couldn’t see it.
Quoting lyrics from “Anar” doesn’t quite reveal the impact of the CD — or Irglová’s live presence. “Anar” succeeds because of Irglová’s ethereal voice — at once powerful and delicate, willful and fragile. Its purity can make her seem vulnerable, though lord knows this is a young woman who can take care of herself while remaining true to her best, most idealistic instincts.
“Let Me Fall In Love,” the first cut on the album, sets the scene:
…to wish for pain-free love is to wish in vain
And anyway, pain does not have to mean suffering
If love is a gift, to it yield an offering
‘Cause when you fall in love
You fall in love with everything, with everyone.
“Anar” comes at romance in a refreshingly old-fashioned way. Irglová seems unafraid to surrender to attraction, ill advised or not: “Am I really in Love?/ Or is it nothing but a test?/ Well if you wanna try me, go ahead and be my guest.” And it’s hard not to love a performer who reminds us in “We Are Good” that “To look is to see/ Everyone as good as they can be.”
“Go Back,” Irglová’s take on an Otis Redding-style soul number, comes complete with a horn section. It has her warning off a potential lover: “You better not come any closer/ Cause I’ll lose myself if you do/ And if in truth I cannot have you/ Don’t encourage me wanting you.” The prospect of losing control swells up again in “Wings of Desire”: “Now I still thirst for that vision/ I still hunger for that touch/ I hardly know what to do with myself/ I want you so much.”
Simple? Perhaps. Naïve? Maybe. But there are worse qualities in a young musician whose work passes my acid test for successful art of any kind: it rings true. Irglová is chronicling a side of love that is too often forgotten in our contemporary culture of sex as power. She writes from the heart. And her songs will remind you that you have one.
“Anar” may require repeat listening before it gets to you. You have to soak in that lovely, Czech-and-Irish-inflected voice. That’s when you fully appreciate this artist who proves Balzac’s dictum that “feelings affect everything and can cross space.”
