This year has given us a wealth of singer-songwriter albums from artists more often associated with the jazz or avant-garde worlds: free jazz saxophonist Zoh Amba went country on Eyes Full and avant-rock guitarist Wendy Eisenberg delivered a folky self-titled record. Carmen Quill plays bass in the polyglot post-rock band Scree and the art-pop trio tilt; her other leader release this year, I’ll Be Thinking of You on Thursday (Live at Close Up) captures a concert at a small Lower East Side club with pianist Jacob Sacks and fusion legend Billy Hart on drums. This past summer, Seattle ensemble The Sky Is a Suitcase, of which she’s still a member despite having relocated to NYC, put out El Jardin, a hard-hitting collection of 1970s-style modal bop. Though the nine tracks on her new album Harmless feature the fluid, free-form sensibility of Quill’s other work, they’re also built around traditional song forms, and showcase Quill’s vocals. 

It’s a turn, but not a hard pivot. Quill’s 2021 solo debut, Don’t Get Comfy / Nowhere consisted of intimate voice pieces with minimal accompaniment, and all three members of tilt sing. Still, Harmless does show Quill devoting more attention to songcraft, moving beyond mood and color to explore dynamics and structure. Quill’s voice, of course, plays a big role. The incantatory phrasing of her first album has been mostly replaced by a full-bodied directness. Her firm, slightly burred soprano drifts and stretches through tracks like “Perseid Afternoon” and “Across the waves,” as it does on her more abstract material, but with greater focus. On the latter cut, with lyrics inspired by Virginia Woolf’s modernist classic To the Lighthouse, she enunciates “Pitch black” with so much authority that it stands in for a conventional chorus. And the impressionistic “Perseid,” on which she sings long cooing, sighing notes while plucking a slow counterpoint on the bass, tells a story despite containing no actual words. 

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Quill’s Scree bandmates show up as well, giving Quill’s compositions more heft. Ryan El-Solh’s swaying, bendy guitar lines enliven opening track “Plaza,” and Quill sporadically uses effects to layer her voice so that it blends with his twangy, twinkly notes. Drummer Jason Burger gives the repetitive, sing-song melody of “Always in my mind” a skittering, EDM-adjacent pulse, while Quill lays down a tense, syncopated riff before bowing her instrument and melting everything down. And Burger’s brushwork and El-Solh’s rhythmic arpeggios lend crucial support to the ballad “Something in the water,” Quill’s strongest stab at art-pop yet. The title track, on the other hand, revolves around a repeated refrain, accentuated by clarinet from Ivan Arteaga and Dana Lyn’s viola, achieving a fraught, hypnotic energy somewhere between Meredith Monk and Kurt Weill. 

Quill’s still restless on Harmless. Lyrical themes involve existential questions, domestic reckonings, and emotional reflection. The music is likewise slippery, with naïve melodies taking complex turns and intricate harmonies dissolving into limpid simplicity. Album closer “Pieces of Gold,” which sounds like Arthur Russell doing a show tune, effectively cuts off the album mid-sentence. Quill may have made a statement with Harmless, but she’s keeping things open-ended.

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