Many of you already know about my unexplainable Sarah McLachlan fixation. For those of you who don't, let me get you up to speed on things: it's the Tori Amos Effect in action; in high school, I might occasionally get into a conversation about Little Earthquakes with a few friends. If the conversation was taking place in mixed company, we'd only talk about the music. But if it was just a bunch of guys, the conversation would inevitably veer toward the following type of exchange:

"So, would you do her?"

"Who, you mean Tori?"

"Yeah."

"Oh, totally."

Don't get me wrong, there's no doubt in my mind that my male friends truly did enjoy Little Earthquakes on its pure musical and/or artistic merits. But these are high school boys we're talking about here; they have sexual fantasies about every woman they know-- the cheerleading squad, the girl they sit behind in history, their history teacher, their friends' older sisters, their friends' moms, and, of course, Tori Amos.

Admittedly, the Tori Amos Effect on its own doesn't completely apply to this McLachlan fixation, since I don't actually listen to her music-- I just think she's hot. However, I must invoke the Vertigo Contingency. This way, the effect still applies in situations where I'm able to fool myself into thinking similar artists simply are Sarah McLachlan.

This is where Heather Duby's Post to Wire finally comes into the picture. Duby is essentially a darker and much less ingratiatingly Adult Contemporary version of Sarah McLachlan. Admittedly, the things that make Duby's voice distinctive are but a subset of the things that make Sarah McLachlan's voice distinctive; take those away and you'd be left with a pretty but rather plain voice. Still, she does a good job of recalling McLachlan without the irksome affectations.

I also must not forget producer and co-songwriter Steve Fisk, who's responsible for a great deal of Post to Wire's success; his sparse, low-key atmospherics are readily identifiable as ambient electronic but skirt the usual stereotypical pitfalls of those genres. While the album's tracks tend to blur together, Fisk sprinkles enough affecting moments throughout to bring the music into focus: the jazzy organ outro to "Falter," the sexy, snarling bass line that buffets "Judith," the tender, muffled waltz of "A Healthy Fear of Monsters," and the Low-like glacial pace of "September."

So yeah, Post to Wire is a good album for the late-night "chill-room" set, and it holds up fairly well on repeated listens. And, of course, it fulfills an important role in the convoluted logic of justifying my perverse fantasy life. However, the Vertigo Contingency can sometimes have, uh... unintended and undesirable side effects:

"Oh god, oh god, yes, oh god, Heather, yes!"

"Heather?!"

"I mean, Sarah! Oh god, Sarah!"

Oops.

-Nick Mirov