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Sanawon music review
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Sanawon Tiny Airplane
Suburban Home
The shrill beauty of The Cranberries and Eisley are almost a double
take to
Sanawon. The vocals, the musical production, the entire album are all a
splendor of stately effeminate misfortunes. Tiny Airplane (Ona Records,
2005) is the complete story to the courtship and relationship, straight
to
the breakdown and bitter breakup. Like scattered memories, the tracks
are
out of order, but after the last song, it can all be pieced together
from
the broken segments. This is the album for that unreasonable split and
all
the afterthoughts that surface, starting with...
Track listing:
01 Best Worst Thing
02 Scary Song
03 Tiny Airplane
04 Count To Ten
05 Ruin
06 Dust
07 Pretty Horses
08 The Fix
09 When Everyone Leaves
10 The End
"Best Worst Thing" -- simply a pretty song about an ex lover that
practically anyone can agree with. Drifting guitars and an innocent
flirt
upon the keyboards present it well.
The title track has those stuttering, rolling drums caught up in their
own
fury. Breathlessly, lead Jenny Choi (keyboards, cello) sings from a
mended,
wiser heart and mind. She appears lost in her own thought, entranced in
reliving the memories.
Standout track "Ruin" is incredible, and lyrically, is the best written
piece on the record. "Losing all your empathy/leads to my demise...
I’ll
give you my tragedy/if you give me your life." It’s in songs like these
that
the underrated attention to women in bands like these becomes
questionable.
Choi actually has something to sing about, and does it hopelessly,
artlessly
(to the point where her honesty is so blatant it melds into art).
Tones of Ivy come into play on "Dust," a dreamy celestial tune with
waves of
flourish notes. In Sanawon, the men are strictly musical, except for
the
notable backing vocals on this track, leaving Choi to express herself.
And
descriptive "Pretty Horses" is sung about a man who angered her at one
point, where passively she handles the issue with her creative
presentation
and gentle, ultra-feminine voice.
Tiny Airplanes takes a turn in the last track, aptly titled "The End,"
where
Choi calls an end to their intimate standpoint that could be basically
summed up as: Wish you well, go to hell. By the song’s end, she has
been
through enough, and starts screaming with the change of pace, having
lived
the relationship until her untimely breaking point.
The Chicago-based band is Choi, Alex Kemp (bass, keyboards, guitars),
Josiah
Mazzaschi (backing vocals, guitars) and Philip Stone (drums).
The band is the polar opposite of its name, which means ‘fierce’ in
Korean.
Tiny Airplane is melodic and ever-so realistically tender, as it
confronts
the everyday altruisms of heartthrobs and heartache. The lyrics, which
pose
as most powerful, construe so many identifiable moments, that Sanawon
seems
to have been there through your relationship, too, all along. Read it
and
weep.
