With Elevator Songs, the first collaboration between multi-Grammy-winning vocal group Roomful of Teeth and singer-songwriter/composer Gabriel Kahane, the laws of time and space give way to pure feeling. Here is an album in which fizzy hooks, slippery chord changes, and the sublime counterpoint of eight voices combine to create a singular, panoramic vision.
With each song—one for each member of Roomful of Teeth and bookended by a pair of tunes sung by Kahane, who wrote and arranged the entire work—a distinct world emerges in a series of hotel rooms: here, a newlywed undone by the sublime topography of the American Southwest; there, a man in midtown Manhattan writing a eulogy for a young AIDS victim in the late 1980s; here again, a fashion influencer slash spiritual guru recording a podcast episode in a militarized, near-future Texas; there again, a U.S. service member confronting PTSD after tours of Iraq and Afghanistan in the mid-aught. Taken as a whole, the LP is as emotionally enveloping as it is sonically diverse
Thick voices are one of my favorite places in which to become lost.