If wide-eyed sincerity isn't your thing, pack your jagged little bag of ironic winks and head for the door. Lavender Diamond's world is one of positive light, and it shines brightly on the band's first full album, Imagine Our Love. The group's name comes from a character in a play written by vocalist Becky Stark — a half-bird/half-human messenger of nature, joy and peace. The L.A.-based ensemble, composed of Stark, drummer Ron Rege Jr. (whose quirky cartoons adorn the album artwork), guitarist Jeff Rosenberg and pianist Steve Gregoropolous, makes music here that is entirely in tune with that shining hope-filled role.
The songs embrace folk and nursery song simplicity, retaining a deeper, sometimes hymn-like, quality within that frame. It is Stark's lovely voice, a crystalline, slow-rippling lake, that shapes this album, her pure, sweet vocals carrying a surprising yearning underneath. With operatic training under her belt, Stark also makes it up effortlessly to superhuman heights, where those other than Mariah Carey fear to tread, as in the slightly clunky "Dance Until Tomorrow." In "Garden Rose," a slow and steady declaration, Stark's voice unspools ever smoothly, with nuggets of dark humor along the way (“I'll never drink the ocean, but the ocean might drink me”). The same sort of wistful playfulness returns in an old-timey, country-tinged "Side of the Lord," not a hymn of praise but an expression of gentle skepticism gliding between alternating major and minor keys.
The bluer, lower edges of Stark's vocal range in "Find a Way," where a slight cloudiness lends complexity and variation, contrasts the brighter and higher-lying chorus of the song, a clear return to comfort. The album, as a whole, parallels this ¬— strong in what Lavender Diamond is clearly good at, upbeat joy and transporting balm, and otherwise falling a little uneven, not reaching for more of that complexity and variation in tone and text. Even as a style, repetitive lyrics can be source for complaint, though often its appearance is not without thought; the recurrence of “I’ll never lie again” throughout a whole song is like affirmation, apology and doubt rolled into one.
The standout single worthy of incessant repeat is the joyous "Open Your Heart," with clapping hands and bubble gum “oh”s that don't fail to turn frowns upside down. Still, amidst all the pop fun, the chorus, “Open your heart/Tear it apart,” comes across as a rousing challenge thrown out to us cynical folk in its violent imagery. It’s the best illustration of an otherwise jarring claim by Stark of a punk aspect to her work. Within the dippy-hippie attitude here is a case made for subversion, which in these modern times can encompass hope and joy. That we might approach this music with anything like suspicion comments on the place of sincerity concerning positive feeling and its presentation in the musical landscape of indie judgments and sharpened pitchforks which Lavender Diamond finds itself.
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