Torch and clang

The last time Eleni Mandell came through town, last October, her spellbinding performance at the True Love Coffeehouse haunted at least one audience member for days afterward.

Mandell has that effect. The 30-something singer-songwriter—who grew up in Los Angeles, gravitated toward its more bohemian side and still lives in the Los Feliz district east of Hollywood—knows how to skirt that fine line between the arty and, well, what used to account for popular music, before Ed McMahon’s Star Search pushed the Mouseketeer aesthetic into Las Vegas overdrive, anyway. And when she sings, she’s a heart-stopper.

Over the course of three fine, independently released albums, Mandell has sketched out a rich musical worldview. It ranges from the ultracool cocktail-thrush moves of Julie London, along with the harder-edged Berlin cabaret style of Lotte Lenya, to a semi-logical extension of what Exene Cervenka was doing with X. Not to mention the kind of junkyard-symphony clanking that made Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs album such a delight.

Cervenka even showed up at the release party for Mandell’s just-released album Snakebite, at the Derby in Hollywood, to read poems from her new book, A Beer on Every Page. And former X drummer D.J. Bonebrake plays marimba and vibes on four songs on Snakebite. And Mandell has played with Andrew Borger, who played with Tom Waits. But, three albums into her career, Mandell has reached the point where feels she’s finally transcended what came before her, and has found her own voice.

“I don’t really want to sound like anybody, anymore,” she says. “And I have my influences, and I have people that I admire and love, but I don’t want to sound like them.”

Later, she admits to a bit of a Waits fixation: “I always freely admitted and really wanted to sound as much like him as I could, really. And I felt like I could get away with it, because I’m a woman.”

Of course, it’s a major stretch to connect the cancer-throated snarl of Waits with something as sultry as what comes out of Mandell when she opens her mouth. But there is a similar focus in subject material—the beautiful futility of love, the sense of nightcrawling through the bittersweet underside of Hollywood that animated Waits’ early Southern California period and still inhabits Mandell’s. And there’s an obsession with textural soundbeds that Waits discovered when he left L.A. for New York, which turns up in some of Mandell’s songs, perhaps more so on her 1998 debut, Wishbone, and its 2000 follow-up, Thrill.

Mandell now feels that she’s left that behind. “There’s not as much clanking, maybe,” she says of her new album. But she still hasn’t reached that point of recognition where comparisons to better-known artists are not forthcoming, and she even offers one. “The first track on the record is really pretty,” she says about a track called “Dreamboat.” “And I thought, oh, we gotta put that one first, ’cause then nobody could say that I sound like P.J. Harvey.”

Not that she has anything against Harvey, whom she saw perform last year and admits to being blown away. It’s just that, after three albums and a lot of hard work, she wouldn’t mind hearing that another artist reminds someone of Eleni Mandell for a change. “It gets tiring to be compared all the time,” she says. “And especially to people who are so much more successful”—here, she laughs—“monetarily, and just in the mainstream.

“Not that I want to be in the mainstream,” she quips before adding that a little major-label support might not be an unwelcome idea at this point.

When Mandell plays Thursday at the True Love, she’ll be backed, as she was last October, by a trio—a textural guitarist, a standup bassist, a drummer. She’ll probably be playing her Silvertone acoustic guitar, and she’ll be casting a different spell than you may be accustomed to hearing.

“I always try to escape being pigeonholed,” she says, laughing. “We’ll see where that takes me.”