Aly Spaltro of Lady Lamb the Beekeeper has taken a mighty interesting path to where she is now as a musician. She hails from Brunswick, Maine, where she first started to write songs. Her strange and tangential melodies initially took form in the midst of a movie rental shop where she worked. Every night, she would lock the doors, pull out her guitar, and spend hours coming up with wildly unique songs, slowly creating a musical personality for herself. Its moniker very appropriately came to her during sleep; seeing it written down next to her bed the following morning, she knew it fit. Over her first five years of maturing as a musician, she recorded five full-length albums’ worth of songs — all strikingly raw, honest, and uninhibited. Today, Lady Lamb begins a new chapter with the release of her first studio-recorded album, Ripely Pine.
Most of Ripely Pine’s songs have already taken some form in her previous releases, whether in conjunction with another or simply executed with an entirely different feel. This time around, however, Spaltro was able to dedicate nine months to the recording of the album, having the means to carry out all of the stylistic ideas swimming in her head. With this opportunity, the transformation in her music has been amazing. If her earlier recordings were a whimsical coloring book she had created for herself, Ripely Pine is the result of Spaltro’s meticulously intricate and fantastical filling-in and embellishing of the framework. The arrestingly colorful orchestrations bring to their predecessors a heaving breath of playful wisdom and earnest expression. In the past, Lady Lamb’s songs came to life primarily onstage. Ripely Pine’s thick orchestration brings forth that life in the songs’ recorded versions, which is a huge feat for any music, and she’s executed it without so much as a hiccup.
What impresses me most about the album is the span in mood, instrumentation, and style that the songs cover. Before Ripely Pine, I regarded Lady Lamb the Beekeeper more or less a folk musician. Every time I listen to this album, however, I am caught off-guard over and over by the immense variation in the feel of the songs. A broader survey of musical style and form could only perhaps be found by scanning through the FM radio. That one person could not only imagine these intricacies but orchestrate them — at 23 years old at that — is nothing short of remarkable. It’s incredibly refreshing to listen to an album which totally stands alone and sounds like nobody but its creator, and Ripely Pine is just that.
