Album Of The Week: Rachel Zeffira The Deserters

You have to have a lot of balls to cover My Bloody Valentine, a band nobody's ever going to match guitar swirl-for-guitar swirl. The Canadian singer Rachel Zeffira has that. But in her take on "To Here Knows When," Zeffira does things with that band's incandescent smear that I've never heard anybody try. Zeffira has a full orchestra behind her, and she's got pianos and strings and woodwinds doing versions of every one of that song's primordial mush. And even though all the pieces of the tune are familiar, it comes out sounding clear and meditative, with a minimal calm that reminds me more of Erik Satie than Kevin Shields. Rather than singing in an approximation of Bilinda Butcher's drowning-in-sound sighs, Zeffira sings in a realxed, poised, matter-of-fact tone, one that puts the song's focus on the crystalline beauty of her voice rather than the special effects that surround it. And so the amniotic roil of the original song becomes a distant memory, one only hinted at. Like just about everything on The Deserters, Zeffira's debut solo album, it sounds like a clear, calm surface, with turbulent waters churning below.