A Fine Frenzy: One Cell in The Sea

What a difference 22 years makes

A fine Frenzy is the effective, if slightly misleading, moniker for 22-year-old musician Alison Sudol. Consider her the singer/songwriter equivalent of another rapidly rising star in the literary world, Marisha Pessl, whose Special Topics In Calamity Physics also hit the hot/talented/head-turning trifecta in 2006. Both writers are bursting with talent squarely couched in a mind-boggling array of literary reference points. Sudol’s melodies drip from the speakers with the same come-hither qualities as Pessl’s verbs and nouns. It’s not a frenzy so much as a warm bath of adjectival butter. One Cell in The Sea, Sudol’s debut, is pretty and mysterious enough to draw plenty of admirers. You’ve heard all of the elements before: the stark, desolate stops on the road between Tori Amos and Coldplay. What sets it apart from the bumbling work of most of her peers are the completely ingenuous correlations between love and nature in her lyrics.