Mecca Normal, Flood Plain (side A)

My favorite Mecca Normal album is 1992's Dovetail, because it perfectly captures the duo's live dynamic.  The awkwardly structured songs perfectly pair David Lester's cutting guitar with Jean Smith's narrative vocal tales.  For such an abstractly conceived group, the songs on Dovetail are surprisingly consistent in style and approach.  A year later, 1993's Flood Plain finds the duo expanding its stylistic reach.  For example, "Current of Agreement" layers many of Smith's voice, rich with reverb, on top of a folkier sound — it resembles Linda Perhacs as much as Mecca Normal.  At another extreme, Smith adds guitar to the dense and distorted soundfield of "Greater Beauty", which pulls it vaguely in the direction of Charalambides.  At other times, songs begin to pull more toward pop forms.  Flood Plain continues to employ the raw and vaguely primitive sonic approach of earlier Mecca Normal albums, with thick midrange and little content in either frequency extreme.  I have trouble reconciling Jean Smith's gray cover painting of a bird and flowers with the music contained here, but the blocky font used for the band name feels perfect.