Album Review: Lia Ices - Ices

All this tangible promise makes her latest, simply titled Ices, all the more frustrating and baffling. While she does deserve credit for the creative ambition to separate herself from perhaps an increasingly overcrowded corner of the pop/rock genre, Lia all but abandons the organic roots of her sound – the very aspect of her music that kept her more pompous tendencies grounded – trading it in for a heavily electronic inflected sound and a variety of pastiche.

From the very beginning, as the Indian-influenced percussion kicks off lead track, “Tell Me”, it’s clearly evident Lia has little interest in continuing down Grown Unknown’s musical path with Ices. The problem is, for an artist that sounded so natural at what she had been doing previously, “Tell Me”s jungle shaded ambience sounds entirely contrived – and it doesn’t stop there. “Thousand Eyes” is bogged down by a hazy stab at mystical psychedelia while “Higher” initially bounds along nicely on its minimal keyboard hook, but its welcome lightness is quickly foiled by a jerry-rigged slab of wanky electric guitar at the chorus.

Ices is not completely without its charms and, unsurprisingly, these reveal themselves as the tracks that Lia keeps it most straight-laced. The mid-album trio of “Magick”, “Electric Arc”, and “Sweet As Ice” makes for a mild rally after the clunky opening third. While nearly torpedoed by Lia’s curious and copious reliance on Auto-Tune on the latter pair, these three get by on a more tempered and better integrated take on electronic in the case of “Magick” and a deft application of minimalism and sly vocal phrasing. This mid-album renaissance is short-lived, however, as “Creature” and “How We Are” all but completely blunts this trio’s allure by ringing their same bell one too many times with less successful results, while closer “Waves” is a plodding, nearly seven minute grind.

Amalgamating multiple subgenres has been pulled off with more success than not a number of times this year, including the tricky task of integrating world music influences – think Bombay Bicycle Club – and pulling but a single thread of a former sound forward to construct a new sound, in the case of TEEN’s vastly underrated The Way And The Color. Unfortunately Lia Ices has not found the same successes on either count here with Ices, her world beats obvious veneer while her crack at electronica too half-baked to portray as much more than Pro Tools tinkering, even with her ballyhooed use of Clams Casino behind the board. Of course, there’s always a next time, and next time could prove startlingly worthwhile if Lia Ices can strike a new balance between her past and her present.