E-Mail This Article to a Friend Drums and wires Scout Niblett’s savage beats BY MIKE MILIARD

From the town of Nottingham, where in 1189 bold Crusaders quaffed mead at Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem (still extant), where Robin Hood ruled Sherwood, comes Scout Niblett (a/k/a Emma Louise Niblett), a singer-songwriter whose wispy frame belies her penchant for muscular backbeats. Not long after her 2001 debut, Sweet Heart Fever (Secretly Canadian), Niblett (who plays T.T. the Bear’s Place this Tuesday) fell in love with the drums. Whereas her first record was melodic, a narcotized waft of strummed guitars and numinous ululations, on her new I Am (Secretly Canadian), she bashes with abandon at what she likes to refer to as her "Ludwig 1965 Silver Sparkle kit and 1920s snare." On I Am, she alludes to death at least seven times. She sings about drums no fewer than four. Twice she combines the two, so that a drumbeat becomes a metaphor of sorts for the big sleep.

Recorded live in the studio over four days, with the help of producer/engineer Steve Albini, I Am derives its lethal power from just those drums, along with some rhythmic stabs at guitar or ukulele, and Niblett’s own feral voice. "I didn’t want to be in the studio for a long time doing overdubs and reworking things, because I think you lose a lot of spontaneity that way," she says over the phone from her home town, adding that she knew from the start that Albini’s scabrous production was a must. "From my experience, he’s the best at getting drum sounds."

Raw austerity has always been the whole of Niblett’s æsthetic. (She says that two of her biggest influences are Daniel Johnston and the Delta blues.) But though Sweet Heart Fever found her foraging for a terrible beauty in her stark and strange songs (and getting tarred by far too many glib reviewers as "the English Cat Power"), she peppers I Am with an intimation of violence that, when not exploding in frenzies of distortion and petulant screaming, lies barely dormant, tamped down by a subdued rhythmic patter. Hers are those rare stripped-down songs that can strip paint.

"For me the vocals are the most important thing," Niblett says. "So to me, having a lot of things going on in the background can take away from the voice, from getting that immediacy of what is said."

What she says can be cryptic. Her lyrics are often informed by writings on the occult and by her own second vocation as an astrologer. On "I Am," she croaks over a discordant guitar that "the magic I Am presence floods right through me, flooding my blood," a reference to what she calls the "individual God source" propounded in obscure Oregon visionary A.D.K. Luk’s Law of Life books. On "Fire Flies," she sings accompanied by just a churning, sea-sick ukulele. "You’re so sweet on the eye," she emotes in a banshee plaint. "You’re gonna charm the world." Then, apropos of nothing, "Fireflies! C’mon I wanna see you have sex!"

Then again, her sultry-sweet schoolgirl voice can make even inscrutable words compelling. There’s an element of childishness at work in Niblett’s songs, but it’s fraught with a certain indefinable weirdness. Although she’s known for dressing up in blond wigs and dowdy jumpers, there’s a subtext of vampish nymphet about her posturing. The album art is spangled with drawings (her own) of boys and girls that convey a vague sense of innocence threatened. "One of the things that I value quite a lot is playfulness," she admits, acknowledging too that she seeks to hone "a double-edged sword, of being quite serious underneath. I find it really empowering, really inspiring, looking at my own mortality. I’m quite obsessed with it. It allows me to feel more alive."

"Your Beat Kicks Back like Death" is one of the tracks on I Am that centers on Niblett’s drumming. "We’re all gonna die," she coos with loopy insouciance over a clattering hi-hat. "We don’t know when, we don’t know how." And she don’t care. "Drummer Boy" also juxtaposes percussion and perdition. It starts with a slowly winding melody, as Niblett chants a sing-song existential parable about scaling "the big glass mountain." No "mortal man has yet succeeded," but the drummer boy, his heart "stout and determined," will try. She offers a wide-eyed incantation to the heavens: "Tell me the road that I must follow, and I will set off in the morning." Then she unleashes a deafening avalanche of noise, peals of thunderous guitar, and huge, crashing drum rolls. "I can’t wait till the morning! I gotta go nooooow!" she screams, spewing forth a blast of punk fury before collapsing in a heap. Bold Crusaders and Robin Hood alike would take notice.