With most bands these days, it seems to be what’s outside that counts. What makes the imaginative duo of Sarah Scott and Jonathan Kochmer -- known as Two Loons for Tea -- stand out from the crowd starts inside. Literally in the case of Sarah.
She’s got an extra rib – 13 of them on one side rather than the conventional dozen.
Maybe there’s a connection between that and the hauntingly beautiful voice, hypnotic melodies and colorfully offbeat lyrics she brings to the music of Two Loons for Tea.
Jonathan, as far as he knows, has the standard number on both sides. But he mirrors his partner’s asymmetry with his visionary musical constructions.
Two Loons for Tea returns five years after its second album -- the critically acclaimed, challenging yet seductive Looking for Landmarks -- and having forged intense bonds with an ever-growing legion of loyal fans in North America and Europe, have delivered Nine Lucid Dreams. Independent in spirit and in business (with their growing Sarathan Records label), the album at once delivers on the promise of its predecessors and opens up new artistic vistas and possibilities for the Seattle-based duo.
Their first two albums and expressive concerts have earned comparisons to Massive Attack, Zero 7, Cocteau Twins, Portishead, Psapp, and Rickie Lee Jones, among many others. And Sarah and Jonathan cite a vast range of influences from Aphex Twin to Xenakis, most of the way through the alphabet. All that now, though, seems at best mere starting points.
Recorded in part at Willie Nelson’s Pedernales Studio in Texas with such friends as drummer Matt Chamberlain (Pearl Jam, Tori Amos), keyboard master Patrick Warren (Michael Penn, Fiona Apple) and strings wizard Eyvind Kang (John Zorn, Blonde Redhead) helping out, Nine Lucid Dreams brings the alchemy of Sarah’s hauntingly beautiful vocals and colorfully imaginative lyrics combined with Jonathan’s vivid musical vision to full fruition.
The title is a perfect fit for the songs that are both crystal clear portrayals and vivid visions worthy of Jung. The atmospheres can shift from being as lush as the Seattle landscapes to as arid and spare as the west-Texas desert, the images range from intimate confessions to colorful character sketches. Very much not about trends and hairdos. But what is it about?
The tingle.
“Our involvement with music is about making a connection with something larger than ourselves,” Jonathan says. “It’s that whole-body tingling feeling we get when we’re recording or performing and alerts us that we’re on the right path.” But it’s not just for them. It’s for the audience. “To hear back reports from others that they’ve experienced the same tingling at home or at shows is wonderful. It’s about creating a community of feeling.”
They’ve certainly created an intriguing community in the character-filled (in both senses of character) array of songs on Nine Lucid Dreams – from the circus-denizens of “The Strongest Man in the World” to the defiant prostitute in “Marietta,” from the delicate yearning of “Tragically Hip” to the Beat surrealist narration of “Consuela” (voiced by Jonathan in his frontman debut) and from the fogged impressionistic account of a hair-stylist friend’s murder in “Eyebrows Are Nature’s Makeup” to the space-age jazzbo-hoedown “Dixie It Up!”
