Review Summary: Natalie Riccio's ambitious debut is anything but what its title presupposes...
At moments unyielding and turbulent, while at others soft-spoken and delicate, Natalie Riccio’s velvety soprano and frantically controlled piano are a rare combination in an industry bathing in the merits of glitzy production value. In her debut musical-autobiography,
How to Fail a Fantasy, Natalie Riccio stays true to the time-tested methods of folk and jazz balladeering, fusing both traditions in a way that transcends the supermarket drone of the modern singer/songwriter format. Presenting ten original compositions inspired by her own life experiences, the time has never been as ripe for Riccio to unveil her collection of poignant tales for the disaffected.
Behind a backdrop of handmade Sicilian puppets in the internationally recognized Stony Creek Puppet House Theater, Riccio and her newly assembled bandmates huddle around a tangled mess of instruments and cables, homemade cookies, a makeshift PA system, and the red glow of electric space-heaters which do little to alleviate the sting of the January cold in 2007. Anything but what it appears at first sight, the sleepy shoreline community of Stony Creek, CT is a town reputed to host an enigmatic cast of restless souls and unlikely musical talents. Just weeks after a handful of rehearsals, Riccio and her itinerate bandmates packed their gear and turned their sights toward Grammy Award-winning engineer Paul Avgerinos’
Unicorn Studios in Redding, Connecticut, where a majority of the cuts were tracked live in a single take. The execution of each tune is the result of Riccio’s meticulous and purposeful craft, following the blueprint of admired luminaries Laura Nyro and Harold Arlen - artists that thrived on perfecting their craft behind the scenes, carefully etching their way into the American psyche.
Barring all immediate scrutiny, it quickly becomes apparent that Riccio’s tunes are both refreshingly modern and disarmingly relevant as she seamlessly maneuvers from one musical moment to the next. Riccio makes no hesitation in paving the way for the album’s pathos, as she hypnotizes the listener with her cool, impenetrable tone. “And I told myself not to go/And I told myself nothing good,” she sings through the fortis of clenched teeth. In addition to the album’s incisive title, even her brightest moments are overcast in irony, forming a consistently moving portrait of the restless and battered bourgeoisie. In a sense, to listen to Riccio’s album is to attend a cocktail party for the damned. “Right from the start, there’s no way in hell/You know deep in my heart, this is never gonna end well,” she delivers in her finest jazz-pop evening dress. Oftentimes incongruent, the album’s more elaborate Sondheim-inspired song structures wrestle each other to the ground as they attempt to uncover some hope of serenity. In “Jumped the Gun”, Riccio waxes Joni Mitchell as she bobs and weaves through Vince Guaraldi syncopation and elegant string runs, flawlessly emerging at the other end with nothing but a smirking disposition. The album’s climax, “A Scene From Bar #454”, showcases the abrasive panache of NYC’s avant-jazz composer/arranger Kyle Saulnier, adding just the right element of dissonant squawk to Riccio’s satirical roadmap for the nocturnal patterns of the bar-hopping elite. The album’s playful atmosphere grows dimmer towards its decline as “Ode To Marshall” describes a celebrity obsession with badboy Eminem, and proceeds to segue into a cerebral Mahavishnu jam-session with splashes of time-bending Gadd-style drumming. The repetitive piano-tinkerings of “Slow Ride” creates a lulling dénouement for the album’s closing, as Radiohead via-Herbie Hancock textures scintillate behind an unmoving panorama, inevitably fading to reflective piano.
Though she possesses the utter faculty to demonstrate all the fortissimo and flamboyance of Queen, Riccio never commits the act of pretension. “I’ve got my shirt un-tucked and my shoelaces untied/And I just want to know, I gotta know will I be alright?”, she contemplates. In effect, Riccio reaches out to that universal cardinal virtue that is all too often discredited – the ability to doubt. On her musical journey towards humility, she reaches out to the listener, knitting blankets of lyrical comfort for our own insecurities, advising that if we can’t learn how to fail a fantasy, then we’re certain to bemoan a collision with reality. The alarming truth that the album arrives at is that the age-old “coming of age” story and all of its callous ambiguity is one that, in fact, lasts a lifetime. If anything could be delivered with more certainty, it’s that Riccio’s career will outlast her own expectations as long as she continues to deliver songs with such heartfelt poise and honesty.
