Album Review: Blue by Suzi Lee

There's a group of horn-rimmed scenesters that hang out at Buckeroo's Mercantile on Mass. Avenue who know cool things, throw cooler parties, and are the guardians of a trove of local treasures. Last week, when I dropped in, Diane was going about her merry way dusting feathers and listening to the faintest, scantest little French fairy-voice. I live for moments like that: walking into a room and being hit in the heart by a most unexpected, most dreamed-of sound. That was the beginning of my controlled adoration of Suzi Lee, Slide bandmember, who has just released her solo and French album, Blue. In this naked cluster of songs she wrote "for myself, to myself, from heart to soothe my soul," every number is aching and wistful and runs a private circuit all day between the head and the heart. The title track is the one that arrests you, and convinces you that you want to be inside Lee's head, even if you spend your time in there melancholic over lost love. The other eight tracks are lovely too, especially "quand j'aime," and the atmospheric "l'esquissse de l'esprit." Lee fronts her simple synthesizer and accordion with an undressed voice that quivers as it delivers; and then digitally deconstructs it through brother Cleve's best technology. She is finally quiet, simple, bare--and beautiful for all those reasons. A-