Album Notes

\"Kristina Morland\'s new album, Pidgin Music, is a delightful collection of snapshot songs, seemingly plucked from a prized but recently rediscovered shoe box filled with poetry and journals.

Arrangements on the ten tracks is varied but restrained, usually arpeggios or repeated rhythmic rounds of guitar, accordion or woodwind lines, threaded carefully with understated vocal or string choruses. These soft beds of melodic ebb and flow allow the vocals (including backing on \"Pirovetting\" from occasional collaborator Clint Niosi) to fetch more of the sweet-amber limelight, giving them the intimate effect of pillow-talk serenades.

Instrumentation in Morland\'s are constant reblendings of gypsy, folk and pop music elements, with one overriding exception: Morland\'s vocals, which contrast soulfully, purposely against the backdrop in a classical jazz, slightly Billie Holiday sort of way.

There\'s a lot of love to be found in Pidgin Music, although often only in the shadows of an apparent aftermath. The accessibility and initial simplicity of Morland\'s songs are just a veneer for a much deeper and rewarding work.

The listener won\'t hear the trappings one may expect from easier sketches of the complicated nature of human relationships. A delicious balance of over-arching melancholy permeates her work here, not unlike something penned by Ray Davies or Nick Cave, with emphasis on affections willfully forsaken than merely caught in limbo, unrequited.

Morland pulls in a slight rotation of key effects (toy pianos on \"Razor Wire\" or back-masked vocal descants on \"Day Dream,\" for example) to add to the playful daydream-like quality of her songs. By including these devices with a variety of instruments (tuba for a bass line, accordion reeds, bongos, hand-claps), she shifts the hue of the orchestration just so, like adjustments made to a kaleidoscope while the viewer peers through the cylinder for the final image. In the meantime, her voice, the constant, is allowed to be heard relatively unaffected and beautiful in whatever context she decides to use it.

In a town filled beyond capacity with great talent, Kristina has an especially powerful gift, more than just rivaling her more-famous contemporaries. Her voice performances have already fetched comparisons with the likes of Feist and Joanna Newsome (who Morland admits she had to stop listening to while penning songs for Pidgin Music, in fear of sounding too much like one of her own favorite artists).\"
-Tom Urquhart Host/Music Director The Good Show FM 88.7 The Choice Fort Worth, TX