Dina Maccabee Sings the Blur in the Middle of the Alphabet on LMNO

Children who learn the English alphabet in song rarely meet L, M, N and O as four clean letters. The tune rushes them. They come out as one smeared syllable, elemenopee, a private word that only later gets pulled apart. Dina Maccabee has taken that smear as a title. LMNO, out on Protomaterial Records, borrows its name from a line in Spell It Out, the bratty center of an otherwise inward record. Hit me with the LMNO. Break the expectation down until it behaves. Eight songs later, the demand has nowhere tidy to land.

She has spent years making other people’s music more exact. Viola and voice beside Julia Holter. Work with Feist, Tune-Yards, Vienna Teng and Carla Kihlstedt. A founding seat in the Real Vocal String Quartet and in the experimental duo Ramon & Jessica. Solo records running from Who Do You Suppose You Are? on Contraphonic in 2010 through The Sharpening Machine on Geomancy in 2019, with Songs 4 Violin + Voice and The World is in the Work between them. There is a musical, Sweet Land, and a score for the Pulitzer-nominated podcast Hysterical. There is also a night at Wesleyan in the lineage of Alvin Lucier, playing I Am Sitting in a Room on the composer’s 90th birthday. The classical training shows in the strings. It also shows in the old fear of doing the thing the wrong way.

Berlin is where these songs started as phone memos. In 2021 she left a stalled New York for a job at Ableton and found the city still shut, dark by late afternoon, German refusing to settle. The memos had no instruments. They had weather, misread rooms, and the wish that someone, anyone, would just explain the day. To get the material onto a stage she picked up the guitar, an instrument she had not mastered, and took the songs to open mic nights at Madame Claude and L.J. Fox until failing in public stopped feeling like a verdict. Ron Shalom, of Minivan Soundsystem, produced with her. The record was made in Brooklyn, Vermont, Berlin, New Hampshire and Oakland, mixed by Ingo Krauss at Candy Bomber Studio, and mastered by Joan Arnau Pàmies, who also runs the label. regaliz cuántico shot and designed the cover, a face barred by the name, as if looking and reading had been asked to share one narrow slot.

I Can’t See It’s Dark opens in subtraction. The voice sits close, almost level, while the line about not being afraid of the dark arrives without a drum to prove it. Jason Slota’s kit is on the track, and on Spell It Out, You Listening and Heavy Duty, but the pulse stays low enough that the room still feels like weather. Light like sound, pain like sound, both of them fading. Punching at the Moon lifts the temperature without breaking the mood. Toby Summerfield’s bass and a round synth low end keep a measured step under a portrait of wasted effort, flexing in the doorway, banging and running, burning a city down to earn attention that was already there. The silence, she sings, is out of tune. That is the album’s real argument. Mishearing can begin in the mouth or in the ear, and the record is rarely sure which one it trusts.

Spell It Out is the joke that funds the title, and the joke has a hook. Dry drums, a pulsing bass, a vocal that slips from melody into something closer to a fed-up aside. The bridge spells the alphabet out loud and still fails to get a straight answer. Are you attracted to my body. Can we ditch this party. Am I hot or not. Karaoke as a peace offering. The bratty pop snap sits inside an electropop frame, close harmonies stacked until the plea sounds like a schoolyard chant that grew up and moved to Berlin. What If This Body answers it from the other side of the room. Pizzicato strings set a circular frame. Pads and low synths widen it. The body becomes a carrying case for the heart, the heart a carrying case for love, love another thing that keeps moving whether anyone is ready. There is no big chorus. The question repeats until it turns into weather.

You Listening is the center of the record, and a quiet correction of the single that named it. A warm synthetic bed, a pulse close to a heartbeat, long instrumental stretches where the song declines to explain itself. The lyric sets a heart beating next to you against thoughts circling like birds, then asks the listener to close their eyes. Nothing you need to know. Nowhere you can begin. The official video holds that patience without dressing it up. A Cat Dream keeps the circle and fills it with a list. Cat, party, blood, airplane, knife, doctor, box. Pizzicato and soft electronic taps carry a dream in which the right words exist and then leave the mouth like dragons. The wish to fix someone collides with the simpler fact that closeness was never on offer. She has no reason to assume she will keep dreaming about them. The line lands clean.

That Scarf resets the album in under a short breath. Summerfield’s baritone guitar, a dry vocal, almost no gloss. Fuck that scarf, knitted for a man who left before it was finished. Fuck happiness, if it required her to arrive already repaired. Williamsburg can keep itself. So can the pied-à-terre in the Mission. The joke is sharp, and the scarf comes back at the end as the only object still willing to travel. Heavy Duty closes the door on the fantasy of a clean translation. Voice fragmented into plucks and delays, pedal steel somewhere in the fog, a slow mechanical beat. Lose the ties that bind you. Find the secret of the silence. Then the title phrase, heavy duty responsibility, stacked until it stops being a slogan and starts being a room tone. The alphabet never gets spelled. The work of hearing does.

LMNO is a record with a clear sense of identity and a useful distrust of certainty. Maccabee’s voice carries it with closeness while the arrangements, from chamber pizzicato to a scarf and a grudge, keep changing the distance. What gives the album weight is the decision to stop waiting for meaning to arrive already decoded.