Lost In Space

Aimee Mann makes beautiful music. This is not a particularly subjective statement; whether it engages you or not, whether you are haunted or bored by it, there’s no denying it’s beautiful. Beautiful enough to emerge victorious after almost a decade of label skirmishes, and beautiful enough to inspire one of the greatest films (Magnolia) of the last decade.

Mann is no innovator, and almost every criticism of her work revolves around this fact. She does not, nor did she ever claim to, push the envelope of her chosen genre. True to form, Lost In Space is more of the same, genetically near-identical to I’m With Stupid and Bachelor No. 2. But when that ‘same’ consists of flagrantly ingenuous and compelling fragments of bittersweet majesty, there’s not much cause to complain.

Mann’s lyrics have always been more idiosyncratic than her music, and have rightly given her a modicum of alternative cred. Occasionally, the persistent conceits on Lost In Space risk seeming silly and frivolous, as in the opener ‘Humpty Dumpty’ and the penultimate ‘The Moth’: “The moth don’t care if the flame is real/‘Cause flame and moth got a sweetheart deal.”

Elsewhere though, they are as incisive and memorable as ever. “Baby please, let me begin/Let me be your heroin(e)/Hate the sinner but love the sin,” she croons ambiguously on the elegiac waltz ‘High On Sunday 51’. Her deceptively unflustered delivery - which manages to smuggle screamfuls of emotion through with a whisper - perfectly carries the slow-burning melancholy of ‘Pavlov’s Bell’, a third-person story song, and the beseeching ballad ‘Today’s The Day’.

But the absolute standout is ‘Invisible Ink,’ a ridiculously gorgeous song in which words, music, performance and production converge like a zodiacal alignment. Easily as splendid as anything on the Magnolia OST, this is a monstrous expression of sadness, the kind of song you can imagine featuring on the soundtrack to the apocalypse. And you can’t fake that. You know she means what she sings.

The title track comes early in the album, with a characteristically evocative chorus: “She’s the face / And I’m the double who keeps the pace / And clears the rubble and / Lost in space, fills up the bubble with air / I’m just pretending to care / Like I’m not even there.” But she is. Aimee’s there.