By: Nora E. Lindner 
Rating: 9/11 

Leah Siegel knows how to use her voice and make it sound effortless. On her most recent album, Little Mule (Walk Don’t Run Records, 2006), she proves it with 12 tracks that range from swooning lyrical ballads to whispered spoken word to classic rock ‘n’ roll numbers. The album is impressively multi-tiered, with a diversity that keeps you listening but isn’t unrealistic for one album concept. 

In “A Day at The River (With You and Your Lover),” she can give her voice fairy-like breathiness. The next track, “The Water,” starts with a playful “whoop!” and with heavy guitar and drums Siegel turns into a dark-humored songstress, jamming as she tells you to “breathe the water in.” 

“A Trail of Peach Pits” is slow, unearthly steps in praise of her adored lover and a proclamation of herself, unapologetically, as “the One” and the “hysterical a veritable dreamer” before waltzing (1-2-3, 1-2-3) into a pronouncement of exaltation and devotion. 

Perhaps her best song is “Pin Down,” a devastating love-lost tale told through her interactions with a spider.  It works, and is more poetic than any literal translation of heartbreak: “I saw a spider that looked like you, crawled like you, oh spider won’t you stay” she sings. And when she croons “I killed the spider,” it’s hard not to be reminded of Ella Fitzgerald who certainly would have appreciated this song and its sentiments.  

It would take pages and pages to go through all of Little Mule and comment on its quiet and subtle beauty as an album. Siegel, who write all her own music, is as natural and seamless in her self-expression as most of the world around her is not. Her talent is as clear as her passion. Its expression is immediately absolute, and enters into the unconscious collection of contemporary music as simply as if it had been there all the time. Perhaps that is why Siegel has been somewhat taken for granted — listening to her, it seems impossible that she was not with us all along.  

A Roches’ like harmony in the final 46 seconds of the album, “The Pond was Dry,” ends the album on that same note that it starts on, coming full circle into ethereal closure — one would almost never know all of the complexity that takes place between the opening and closing of Little Mule, except for its above mentioned innateness at first listen. 

Leah recorded Little Mule with Steve Elliot (guitar), Chris Tarry (bass) and Brian Wolfe (drums) and continues to tour with them (with the exception of Tarry — Tim Luntzel taking over bass), performing regularly in New York. Visit her Myspace for her latest gig dates.