SF Weekly review

This four-song EP provides a voyeuristic glimpse into the innermost sanctum of songwriter Edith Frost, a silvery-voiced Austinite-turned-Brooklynite with a few insecurities to work out. Though Frost has hearned her keep in a variety of country and rockabilly bands, her spare, compelling songs don’t need the kind of help a melodramatic pedal steel guitar or upright bass would provide. Indeed, her striking demo tape — with one exception, it’s nothing more than a rudimentary, buzzing guitar and her eerie doubled-up vocals — was enough to convince the folks at Drag City to press the recording as it was.

Through three songs — "Evangeline," "Blame You," and "My God Insane" — Frost plinks and sighs like she’d just as soon go back to bed, though she’s probably already been there for days. Rather than obscuring her ideas, the murky, no-budget production values of "My God Insane" vividly illuminate the song’s hollow core. "I’m tired of thinking so hard," Frost sings, disarmingly, on "Blame You." "I’m tired of fighting for air."

On the EP’s final track, "Waiting Room," Frost expands on such weary minimalism by composing with the help of a chintzy portable keyboard — following the latest tangent of her new labelmate, Palace’s Will Oldham. The soulless, Fisher-Price quality the instrument gives her simplistic melody strongly suggests the nightmares of childhood — and the record’s cover art seconds that notion, featuring a black-and-white photo of the artist as a young girl. In it, her despair seems too much for a child to shoulder; hopefully, it was just a mood she was in.