Is it OK for a band to follow a great album with a good one? I don't think so. I want artist's trajectories to be like that setting on the Stairclimber, where the hill gets higher and higher until you barely can stand it, then, cool down and finish. This is why I envy the new generation of music listeners, which has the option go right to allmusic.com to find out which Guided by Voices or Fall albums to listen to first, then next, and which to not bother with at all. Us older folk had to just take them in the order they came.

"God Save the Clientele" is not as good as "Strange Geometry". It just isn't. From first listen, it screams at you THIS IS OUR SECOND BEST ALBUM!!!! PLEASE FORGIVE US FOR NOT MAKING ANOTHER MASTERPIECE!! GIVE US A REST!! Granted, "Strange Geometry", a break-up album equal to the Replacements "All Shook Down" and Elvis Costello's "Blood and Chocolate", must have been very painful to make. There is not a song on that work, from "Since K got Over me" to "E.M.P.T.Y." that didn't take every emotional risk in the book---and pay off on each one. On a personal level, it was the only album I could really listen to during the year and a half long depression that was 2005-2006, and definitely the only music that still sounds untainted from that part of my life.

Now, on a very sunny and warm day in Portland Oregon, as I lazily read about the demise of Jerry Falwell, "Winter on Victoria Street" fills my untroubled mind like the the breeze on the back of my neck. This music is bright, airy, optimistic, and hopeful; as convincing a portrait of joy and recovery from pain as you could hope for.

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Let me just start out by putting my head right in my own guillotine. I really like Lavender Diamond. I like Becky Stark, her cute little roller skates, her child-like lyrics—I have been totally sold on this band since hearing the track “You Broke my Heart” off their first EP “Calvary of Light,” which I played on my way to work every single day for about a month. I also know that I will probably have to fight an urge to disown this music very quickly once “Imagine Our Love” hits the heavy Starbucks rotation list.

I went to a Canadian school, so due to Canadian content protocol, I spent much of my time delving deep into the back catalogs of Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen and Neil Young for my weekly radio program. Each has stuck with me, Leonard and Neil generally have a rotating spot on my ipod, while Joni, being the most problematic of the three, occupies a more solitary format: that of poorly labeled cassette dubs from college friends and old haggard vinyl LPs. I mean, do I really want to have “Both Sides Now” or “The Circle Game” blasting out of my car as I pull into the parking lot of the high school where I teach? And Joni is solitary music anyway; this is the woman who traveled all the way to New York for Woodstock to play only to stay in her hotel room and watch it on TV when she heard about the pandemonium. Yes, and this is where she wrote “Woodstock”. (Neil’s homage, in which he refers to the whole event as “that helicopter day,” is actually much better.)

On Joni’s first three albums or so, before she discovered jazz and Marlboros and got all into writing better lyrics and shit, the simplicity and longing of her clear, youthful, take-me-as-I-am voice was the most incisive, knife through the ice music of anything contemporary to her in the Nixon era. Not just the thinly disguised protest songs, but even the love ballads on “Clouds”. When I give those albums a once over, I find to my surprise that the lyrics aren’t really all that great (they get much better very quickly as the seventies progress). Yet this doesn’t seem to matter very much even now. What we have instead is a voice of angry, disturbed, passionate innocence; an idealism that could never last very long in the steaming pile of hopelessness that was 1970, and a voice that could never withstand the amount of cigarettes it was about to be fed.

So is Lavender Diamond’s Becky Stark Joni for the Bush II era? Tracks like “Garden Rose” and “Open Your Heart” would suggest the same type of forgivable naivety, lack of “appropriate” distance of lyrics from emotions being expressed, and level of vocal range and power that makes a listener want to forgive all of these major poetic faux pas. The way Stark convinces, like Joni, is through the power and beauty of her voice. This alone would make this music worth hearing, but the guitar and piano arrangements on “Hear Comes One” and the strings on “Open Your Heart” make the whole thing, well, just really damn pretty. And Lavender Diamond’s music on “Imagine our Love,” music about love, peace, understanding and joy, encourages us back to an early Joni version of innocence and idealism, which, in the utter ugliness and stupidity that is 2007, is just as shockingly refreshing as it was in 1970.

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