Dani Siciliano

Despite her breezy R&B vocals, Dani Siciliano sings in spidery movements, bending around the beats as if controlled by Etch-a-Sketch knobs, while producer Matthew Herbert smashes together traditional soul and blues elements with forcefully inorganic electronic rhythms. "Be My Producer" crackles with insect ticks and stuttering plinks of bass, making...

By Terry Sawyer

September 14, 2006

Audio By Carbonatix

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Despite her breezy R&B vocals, Dani Siciliano sings in spidery movements, bending around the beats as if controlled by Etch-a-Sketch knobs, while producer Matthew Herbert smashes together traditional soul and blues elements with forcefully inorganic electronic rhythms. "Be My Producer" crackles with insect ticks and stuttering plinks of bass, making the song feel danceable even though it's almost too cut up to have momentum. Siciliano's really a torch singer lost in all the refracting fissures of Herbert's quiver. When the slipping but spare acoustic riff and horns blow in on "Why Can't I Make You High," it's easy to wonder if maybe less might be more, if perhaps these songs are too compositionally self-conscious for anyone to really get into. To make matters worse, the tunes are delivered with a hot whisper that gets obscured by a maze of glitches, bleeps and reversing loops. Siciliano would have been well advised to take lessons from another of Herbert's chanteuses, Roison Murphy, whose latest album maintains all the sharp corners while still allowing the singer's hooks to flow to the top.

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