Jewlia Eisenberg’s Trilectic is, in a sense, the easiest-to-like album that I’ve ever reviewed. You don’t have to worry about guitar distortion, or drones, or shards of feedback, because Trilectic has no guitars. I won't compare the synthesizers to tin-can starships or steam-pipes tuning up, nor do they shimmer or wobble or gleam, because Trilectic has no synthesizers. You don’t have to wonder if either of us know what I’m talking about when I compare the piano parts to Mussorgsky or Debussy or Ben Folds, because Trilectic has no piano. You don’t have to remember if you like ocarinas or flugelhorns or cornets, or if you prefer bowed strings to pizzicato, because Trilectic has no woodwinds, brass, or acoustic strings.

“Sicily” (track 13 of 19) has trap drums and a rubbery bass-line in 11/8 time, and two of the last three songs also have drums. Otherwise, we have only the clear, flexible voices of Jewlia and two of her female bandmates from San Francisco’s off-beat world-music band Charming Hostess, plus three songs with mouth percussion from Frank Grau. To say that Trilectic is my favorite a-capella album is a dubious honor: until last week I only owned five a-capella records, none resembling any of the others. But Trilectic is also part of why I’m now making up for this shortage: it is captivating.

I want to share some of Jewlia’s liner notes. She is a musicologist as well as a musician, and I am not, so my listening process included a lot of her telling the listener what she’s doing, and me comparing the music to half-formed impressions in my head and saying “Um... yeah, that makes sense”. On Trilectic, she says, “I draw on Jewish secular and liturgical music from al-Andalus to Ashkenaz, Galician codices, African-American forms like work songs and doo-wop, Bulgarian village music, Pygmy music, punk, Stravinsky, and heartbeats, handclaps, the way I breathe during sex”.

The variety, in other words, is extremely high, but most of these are populist sounds (and even Stravinsky’s early radicalism had a fair amount to do with inserting ideas from African folk into European classicism, although I think “Galician codices” refers to the music of medieval Spanish monks). We have here a millennium or more of sounds from people working, worshipping, courting, dancing, mating, and flipping off authorities, as well as occasionally studying. We have words in English, German, Yiddish, Italian, Spanish, and I think maybe Russian. Scientists still have only the lamest guesses at why music seems instinctive for us humans, but since it does, Jewlia Eisenberg is blending some of the most instinctive sounds we’ve ever had to invent first.

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In practice, though, most of us speak fewer languages than Jewlia, and most of our voices lack the purity of her Hebraic hymnals and/or the sensuality of her more “African-American forms”. Even if any of you got that lucky voice-wise, you might not be as precise in following the shifting 3-part harmonies and polyphonies. Any of you who _can_ sing along, definitely ought to, is my opinion. The rest of us may be intimidated into mostly listening. So what’s that like?

The first three songs outline a wide range for the album to explore. The gorgeous “Mi Dimandas” has the solemnity and unison vocal rhythm of Christian hymns, and the tunings I recall from the Israeli folk-dance classes my Dad used to take me to when I visited him. “Gershom is Shocked” reminds me of Boston’s sex-crazed a-capella group Double Dong (but with more melody): one vocalist sorta meowing, one maintaining a breathy “mmm, ba-ba-ba” rhythm, the male singer exhaling in porn-star grunts, and Jewlia infusing slow blues with some of the agility of scat-singing. “Meister of Kultur”, meanwhile, subsumes several styles into fast clipped diction, like the smartest girls in the school choir singing their Persuasive Essay assignment to their German class.

All but two of the songs are under three minutes. This doesn’t make them simple-minded or unfinished. I’d already noticed before owning this album that once you’re not worrying how to build up the rhythm section and squeeze in your guitar chords and solos, you can squeeze one heck of a lot of music into a 1:59 span, as when “Eskimo Suit”’s doo-wop/gospel, set to human beatbox, breaks into what would be vaudeville if the melody seemed more western. Or into 2:54: most of “Fortress Moscow” is a fast peasant reel, Carla Kihlstedt and Nina Rolle singing what might have been fiddle and flute parts, but I’m reminded of both church music and Moody Blues-era psychedelia before it ends.

The four-minute songs, both sung in English, stretch out to more classic pop construction and could, in a better world, make great radio singles. It’s true that “Sicily”, the one with rhythm instruments, would be a deceptive choice: Jewlia sings low and sad (Portishead’s Beth Gibbons comes to mind), the jazzy bass rumbles along tensely. On the radio, it would lead me to expect an album like What it is by the Boston band Cordelia’s Dad. But the sultry “Dream of Me”, from which I’d never guess Jewlia was white (though I’d be impressed she was hanging out with such nice Israeli backup singers), would confuse the issue in a healthy way; and a seduction song that starts “I won’t break up your home/ I got one of my own” is more interesting than anything Mariah or Janet do come-ons with.

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There is a reason why the song titles seem odd: Trilectic tells a story, a real-life one. It is an illicit-love story from 1926-27, an affair between radical Jewish intellectuals: Walter Benjamin (bits of whose work on aesthetics and language I’ve run across at some point) and Asja Lacis. Walter’s Moscow Diary tells his side of the story: in Jewlia’s words, “This diary deals with a lot, including the relationship of art to politics, the meaning of popular material culture, the role of the left-cultural opposition in Moscow, and his relationship to institutionalized socialism. But the emotional punch of the diary is provided by his love of the moody and diffident Asja. The diary documents his melancholy and isolation ... [it] offers the thrill of an intellectual Rocky: a little guy kvetching against everything stacked against him. He’s willing to fight impossible odds, but he’s a Jewish Rocky, so he’s bound to lose”.

The mind of the moody, diffident Asja is harder to crack: her diary is obsessively impersonal, “ 1/3 Soviet propaganda, 1/3 addled rambling, 1/3 compelling fragments about this fiery charismatic and her cool radical circle of friends. She talks about herself... [by] only including things that are important politically, and those in a very scattered way”.

Jewlia’s challenge, then, was to write and sing their story from both perspectives even though Asja wasn’t providing her own. Many of Walter’s songs are cribbed from his diary. This works: a happy side-effect of multi-part vocals in a foreign language is that we can read movingly clumsy words that were never meant as lyrics (e.g. “Whether I can achieve the secondary purpose of my journey – to escape the deadly melancholy of Christmas – remains to be seen”), yet we hear the words as deeply-felt music, arranged here into an anti-carol. Talk about communism blends into to talk of love, and hey, in both Walter wants fair chances for the needy.

Asja’s more emotive words, though, are imagined, guessed at: from Walter’s stories, and the stories told of her by friends and acquaintances. “Dream of Me”, for example, is a thoughtful and multi-faceted (yet _very_ sexy) invitation to sin – but it’s based purely on Susan Buck-Moss’s belief that Asja hoped Walter would stop being such a devoted wife-loving nebbish. "Guinea Tea" is a very neat lyric:

"Sitting at the kitchen table, watching him eat my food;
he is wearing what he calls a 'Guinea T'.
Others call it a 'wife-beater',
but he would never do that.
He could take me away;
I was hoping he would take me away.
But he would never do that."

But if Asja felt that, she never fessed up, though Walter's writings make clear how he would have welcomed it. How many love affairs have fallen apart for reasons like this?

Of all the romances in the world, you wouldn’t necessarily pick Walter’s and Asja’s as the first to spend 44 minutes with, but (1) the melodies they’re set to are lovely and fascinating, simple yet deep, and (2) the story mattered. It mattered to them, just as our lives matter to us; and when Jewlia Eisenberg took the time to care, to investigate, and to rebuild their piece of lost world, she blessed their emotions with a permanence ours don’t have. Things fall apart; entropy increases. We know this like we know that space is a vacuum, and it sucks. But historians and musicologists, even singers, they have the power to put their feet down and say “Not on my watch!”.

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(Trilectic is from 2002. To hear Jewlia's singing and writing in a rock-band format, with more sex and less back-story, you can check out Red Pocket's very fine 2004 album Thick.)

Recommended: Yes