Frontier

Album review

Recorded at home in New Mexico, the second album by Rio en Medio -- the name that singer/songwriter Danielle Stech-Homsy uses for what is by most definitions a solo project -- continues to explore the space where the boundaries between folk songs and electronic atmospherics blur. If that sounds a little new agey, fear not; this owes far more to dark indie singer/songwriter styles than anything to do with wholesome electronic mysticism. The songs might actually be slighter than the atmospherics, Stech-Homsy's wispy voice and poetic lyrics falling into a roughly similar category as quite a few other singer/songwriters of her time in their indefinite meaning, or even vagueness. The use of different synthesizers to create haunting drones and tones, however, remains creative, investing the compositions with a level of uneasy mystery they couldn't reach with standard acoustic instrumentation (though there's some of that too). The purely instrumental "Venus of Willendorf" suggests that Stech-Homsy could have made the record more effective by including more passages where she relies purely on the music to evoke such moods. But the album still succeeds at conveying her quirkily dreamy world, even if it's a rather deadly serious one.

© Richie Unterberger /TiVo