Elizabeth and the Catapult is back with The Other Side of Zero

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Riding on the coattails of a well-received debut album, the New York-based trio Elizabeth and the Catapult is back with its sophomore effort, The Other Side of Zero. Where Brooklyn-bred songstress Elizabeth Ziman and her band’s first album Taller Children comprised cheery, light-hearted songs, the second features darker, tongue-in-cheek tracks sung from the perspective of an embittered, heartbroken girl who is torn between telling her former lover to screw himself (Thank You For Nothing, Go Away My Lover) and running back into his warm embrace (You & Me, Dreamcatcher, Don’t Hang Your Head).

The soft-spoken, Feist-like leading lady’s muse for this album was the ever-inspiring Leonard Cohen’s 2006 Book of Longing, a collection of poems that illustrated his struggle to meet Buddhist goals in a monastery. Ziman found parallels between Cohen’s plight and her own personal struggles through relationships and growing up in New York, and voilá, a record was conceived.

Elizabeth and the Catapult’s potential gleams in tracks like the dark percussion-, clap- and whistle-driven duet, “Go Away My Lover,” and the chilling, epic violin and piano crescendo in the album closer, “Do Not Hang Your Head.” These songs evoke feelings of love, spite and longing in the instrumentation just as much, if not more, than in the lyrics. This may be the band’s largest strength as well as downfall. If the trio focused on instrumentation a little more (Ziman has experience with film scores), this album could have been more interesting. But instead the music takes the backburner to the songstress’ lyrics, which sound far too formulaic and a bit contrived, straying from the genuine writings of Cohen.

We’ve all heard albums dealing with love and breakups—this concept is nothing new—so to produce a successful record with this underlying theme, it is crucial for the musician(s) to add a new twist on the subject, either musically or lyrically. Although Elizabeth and The Catapult got close musically, it’s just not quite there, leaving this collection of songs, as Ziman herself put it in a track title, a worn out tune.

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