Articles

Mazzy Star

by Erin Martin, RocknPop, August 1997

I crept alone through the foggy darkness. The room is empty, but I bump into everything anyway. Choirs of demons raise their voices and I attempt to hide from them in a blackened corner. Emptiness rushes in and out of me through the vacancy occupying my insatiable soul. I hear their denial and I know their rage. I hear so many voices at once in this hollow vacuum of sound. All at once, the silence transforms into something...beautiful. The blank walls scatter the drop of sun. The darkness has become a majestic place of comfort for me. I breathe this new realm in and learn it has a name, and that name is Mazzy Star. The band has sometimes been criticized as being "obscure", "underground", "boring", or "depressing". You have to evaluate each adjective to wonder what the bad part is. "Obscure" and "underground" assure you that this band won't be plastered all over the media for publicity stunts or psychotic behavior. This also means that unthinking radio addicts will have a very limited knowledge of Mazzy. Mazzy Star gives you music that you can feel is yours alone. You have to wonder, also, why underground is so bad - that's where the buried treasure is.

Some people may find Mazzy's low-key approach and Hope Sandoval's vaguely Nico-esque vocals are "boring". These are the people who would read if there weren't so many letters. The music of Mazzy Star is an intricate maze, delicate paths entwined to only be decipherable to open-minded, pensive souls. "Depressing" turns up frequently with the band's name. Perhaps the hazy surreality of the music is too much for some people to handle. The rest of the people know enough to understand that a single word cannot encompass the entire sound. The music is actually made up of myriad textures, exquisitely woven into a magic carpet.

Much like the music of my co-favorites, Tori Amos and Sarah McLachlan, you can identify different points of view from album to album. Mazzy Star's debut album, "She Hangs Brightly" was exemplary of the members' (Hope Sandoval and Dave Roback) Golden Age of their romance. Lyrics like "and I'll love you forever and ever and ever" and "Give you my lovin' seven days a week" express this clearly. "So Tonight That I Might See" shatters the image with stories of their breakup. Mesmerizing songs like "Fade Into You", "Bells Ring", and "Into Dust" spell out the surprise and questions about their breakup.

"Among My Swan", filled with titles like "Take Everything", "Still Cold", and "Cry, Cry", explores the aftermath of the breakup. Hope and Dave are still trying to adjust to having separate personal lives and realize that things have changed. Any of these albums is a masterpiece, for the novice fan or the massive fanatic.

Further into the darkness now, I wandered to the blackened window. A velvet sky stretched out before me and I found solace in what I saw. The subtle yet dazzling intensity of a Mazzy Star led me home.