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Alex Schaaf recorded his debut album, The Mistress, alone in his Wisconsin bedroom. Under the moniker Yellow Ostrich, Schaaf’s music has the intimate feeling of poetry reverberating off the four walls of his confined space. The minimalist song structures use instruments to fill in gaps in the open-ended tracks. An occasional thud of a kick drum or piano chord have a jarring effect, seeming out of place with the flowing vocal melodies, but it is those vocals that provide the meat of the album.
Schaaf’s voice is looped, layered and stretched in every conceivable way. Acting as the main rhythm of the songs, the hums and “oohs” lay the foundation for Shaaf’s introspective tales. The vocals swell, rise, fall, build into a wall of reverb and disappear into a whisper, providing a ghostly harmony to the chugging garage rock of “Hate Me Soon” and a solemn hymnal sound to “Mary.”
The major drawback to The Mistress is that, for all of the kaleidoscopic arrangements, the album still lacks variety. Stylistically and aesthetically there is not much change from one track to the next. What Schaaf does he does well, though. The layered humming of “Mary” gives the song a haunting feeling as it goes from optimistic (“Mary says it’s okay…everything turns around”) to bleak (“Mary, you are doing drugs; don’t you think we know?”).
Since recording the album, Yellow Ostrich transformed from a solo act to a three-piece, with Schaaf joined by bassist Jon Natchez and drummer Michael Tapper. The additional musicians flesh out three bonus tracks that close The Mistress. That speaks well for the future of Yellow Ostrich, presuming the three-member approach fleshes out the sound and takes it in different directions.
