Banshees

Ida Maria Borli Sivertsen was a complete unknown until a few years ago when she won a couple of Norwegian talent competitions, making her huge in Oslo. What’s given Maria a surprising amount of buzz elsewhere, besides shortening her name to the punchier Ida Maria (pronounced Ee-dah Muh-ree-uh), is a reputation for staggeringly drunk live performances and rumors, often whispered for effect, that she has one of those voices. I can’t speak to her stage persona–she cites Iggy Pop as an influence, though eyewitnesses report Dudley Moore–but Maria’s voice will stop you in your earbuds. At 24, she sings with a mad, husky vulnerability, twirling her subjects on a string while she completely falls apart. Maria can indeed carry a tune, usually over the edge of a cliff.

On her debut album, Fortress Round My Heart, Maria opens with the perfect song for her aesthetic. “Oh My God” is basically just a few frantic chords and two repeated phrases–“Find a cure/Find a cure for my life” in the verse and “Oh my God” in the chorus. One lyric is a prayer for control; the other a realization that she has none, and Maria plays the former like someone meditating before a hurricane and the latter like the hurricane itself. She roars from the back of her throat, timing the G in God to the crash of the snare and the shriek of the guitar. With a backing band seemingly as crazy and hellbent as she is, it’s a haymaker of a song. (See the top 10 albums of 2008.)

The problem is that Fortress follows that haymaker with another and another, until you realize Maria is adept at just one kind of punch. A few of these two-to-three-minute wraths (“Louie” and “I Like You So Much Better When You’re Naked”) are tuneful enough to stick with you, but they don’t do much emotionally, and they all end up feeling numbingly similar, like fury masquerading as fun. As the album chugs on, it becomes clear that Maria hasn’t quite figured out what she’d like to say to the world–“I know I’m always drunk as drunk as can be” is a fairly representative lyric–only the manner in which she wants to say it.

For a lesson in how to put a great voice to good use, look to PJ Harvey’s A Woman a Man Walked By. In 1992, Harvey debuted much as Maria did, as a young woman from a small town in rural England preceded by reports of otherworldly pipes. Now 39, Harvey’s got a catalog of near genius records, largely because she developed a musical and emotional repertoire to go along with her talent. She can throw every punch there is.

By Harvey’s standards, A Woman a Man Walked By is kind of a lark. You can tell because she let frequent collaborator John Parish write the music (to her lyrics) and play all the instruments; when she’s serious, Harvey handles everything save the shrink-wrap. Still, it’s an excellent version of an underrated career in miniature.

The simple bluesy opener, “Black Hearted Love,” walks up to the edge of carnal desperation (“When you call out my name in rapture/I volunteer my soul for murder”) but never quite cedes control. “Leaving California” is sweeter, and sounds it; built on quaintly out-of-tune acoustic guitars and twinkling piano, it’s a credible country waltz. “Sixteen, Fifteen, Fourteen” grooves like Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks” even as it tells a folktale of a doomed girl.

A Woman a Man Walked By isn’t as focused as Harvey’s best work, but it’s just as charismatic and intense. Harvey moves between characters and feelings–teasing and threatening, seducing and comforting–all with one amazing voice.

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