Kate Bush - Director's Cut (EMI)
By audaciously re-recording and repackaging tracks from two albums in her back catalogue, Kate Bush seems to have caused some consternation. First, it's astonishing that in spite of being told that the new material from Kate Bush was not going to be a new album as such, many people still seemed to be expecting exactly that. Secondly, and more significantly, why do so may people seem to think revisiting material from the past is such a musical crime? Jazz musicians do so all the time, not just in re-interpreting the standard repertoire, but in reworking their own material. Wayne Shorter has recorded Footprints several times with a variety of ensembles. I see no reason for a song to be a solid, locked in artefact once it has been recorded. Why can it not be a living, breathing artefact, open to new performances and arrangements as time passes? Bob Dylan has long understood this very well.
Another subjective issue in any asssessment of Director's Cut is the apparent consensus that The Sensual World and The Red Shoes (the two albums from which these tracks are sourced) are the weakest and least admired of Bush's albums. I've never quite understood why this might be. For sure, Hounds of Love set an impressive conceptual and artistic standard - but I've always found an embarrassment of riches across these albums, even when they apparently present Bush at her most conventional. Her songwriting has been consistently strong.
Clearly, there were elements in the production and arrangement of this material that Bush herself was never happy with - Director's Cut has afforded her the chance to go back and make alterations. Some of these are very minor, pedantic changes. Others are massively significant. The result is an album that probably has little chance of rising to the top of fans' favourites, but which offers a brilliant case study of Kate Bush's artistic temperament and attention to detail - and, most interestingly of all perhaps, evidence of the change in timbre in her voice since the original tracks were recorded.
This change is immediately clear on Flower of the Mountain, a new version of The Sensual World in which Bush has finally been given permission to use Molly Bloom's soliloquy from James Joyce's Ulysees. Her voice seems older, perhaps wiser but also less adventurous somehow. Other than the new vocal, there isn't a lot of difference between this new version and the original, and I have to admit that the original sounded more erotic and involving to my ears. It sounds rather as if Bush is struggling to adapt the song to the words she always wanted to use. Her own actually worked more effectively. There are other alterations that seem to spoil the atmosphere of the original songs too - Lily is transformed into a rather lumbering funk-rock track, with superfluous streams of distorted guitar. It actually sounded less dated in its original guise.
Perhaps the most significant change throughout is the drums. These often seemed over-produced on the original albums, but here she has captured a much more natural, warm and acoustic drum sound. This comes across particularly clearly on the wonderful new versions of Deeper Understanding and Song of Solomon. The latter is a great example of how very subtle modifications can have a tremendous impact. The backing vocals of the Trio Bulgarka much clearer, and it has a tremendously detailed mood. The vocoder section of Deeper Understanding (featuring Bush's son Bertie) has caused some controversy. It perhaps makes the song sound less futuristic and even more of its time, however prescient it was when first released. Bush's tale of computer addiction has very much been borne out in the internet age. The mysterious, wordless extended coda, with its lithe, expressive drum pattern, is simply magnificent.
The most substantial changes are sure to divide opinion. This Woman's Work, among her most loved songs, and something of a power ballad in its original form, has been completely transformed into an Eno-esque, spacey, ambient lament. It tugs on the heartstrings a little less, but perhaps its distinctive contemplative melancholy is more nuanced and more realistic. I love both versions - the old one, of course, is very much still there. Less successful for me is Rubberband Girl, now remodelled as a clunky Rolling Stones pastiche. This kind of context just does not really suit Bush's flighty, theatrical approach to singing - it simply shows that she works far better as an idiosyncratic solo artist than as frontwoman in a rock and roll band.
Less transformative, but brilliantly designed nonetheless, is the new version of Moments of Pleasure. This was always a strong song - but even the most die-hard of Bush fans would surely have to admit that the original was a little over the top. This new version retains the piano ballad template, but the delivery and execution are considerably more restrained and elegant. Along with Song of Solomon, Deeper Understanding and This Woman's Work, it is one of the album's great triumphs.
On listening to Director's Cut, I'm reminded of something Ian Carr used to say a lot in his jazz workshops at WAC (now threatened with closure due to Arts Council cuts) - 'sometimes you have to look back in order to move forwards.' It's very wise advice actually, and I wonder when new Bush material does emerge, it might be considerably stronger as a result of her hard work on this project. Even if I'm wrong in this prediction, there's something hugely satisfying in seeing Bush wrongfoot everyone in such committed, steadfast style. Once again, it seems she is restless and on the move.
Showing posts with label Songwriters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Songwriters. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
England's Dreaming
PJ Harvey - Let England Shake (Island)
Much as I really admire the writing and expertise of Rob Young, I can't help but question his assessment of the new PJ Harvey album in this month's Wire magazine. It's good to read a balanced review that steers clear of hyperbole or cynical attacks but his assertion that Let England Shake feels unfinished feels like a mistake to me. As is often the case with PJ Harvey albums, the music is raw, direct and sometimes combative but to me this feels like one of Harvey's most cohesive and successful artistic statements. It's impressive that so far into a recording career of perhaps surprising longevity, Harvey is continuing to develop and expand her horizons.
Thematically, Let England Shake could be presented as a logical extension of the concerns of its predecessor, 2007's White Chalk. On that album, Harvey seemed preoccupied with images of the English landscape - concerns that seemed to inspire her to traverse new musical terrain too, finding a new, higher vocal register and basing many of the arrangements around her rather rudimentary piano playing (even starker and less finessed than Joanna Newsom's). Some of those thoughts recur - as Harvey sings of the white cliffs of Dover for example - but Let England Shake seems to be aimed at broader concerns. Here, PJ Harvey addresses both imperial history and a war-dominated present, perhaps suggesting that England's glory has been blighted by war.
Few songwriters would have the historical impulse to make reference to the doomed Galipoli campaign, but sometimes Harvey's lyrics feel more impressionistic than some writers have suggested. On 'The Last Living Rose', she risks sounding like a Daily Express leader - 'Goddamn Europeans! Take me back to beautiful England'. Presumably, her attention is ironic, drawing attention the nation's imperial decline (for which reason I'm never quite sure whether she really means England, or is in fact speaking more generally about Britain).
Perhaps the most interesting feature about Let England Shake, the element that most reviews have bafflingly ignored, is how it sounds. Harvey has always had a tremendous gift for getting maximum results from the bare minimum of material. That she seems to do this without ever really repeating herself makes this all the more impressive. Whereas White Chalk foregrounded rudimentary piano, the guitar and Harvey's autoharp are at the heart of Let England Shake. Much of the music is based on very basic strumming patterns - yet it sounds primal and urgent rather than purely reductive. A finely balanced degree of reverb adds to the sense of impending doom.
Another common feature is call and response vocal techniques, which are used to superb effect on both The Glorious Land and The Words That Maketh Murder (on which Mick Harvey joins in), two of Harvey's finest songs to date. Basic rock and roll music is transformed into something more mysterious - something much closer to an English folk tradition.
Harvey also adds elements that seem incongruous - sometimes they are very obviously exactly that. The sample of Niney's Blood and Fire that underpins Written On The Forehead is not matched to the song's pitch or tempo and neither is the bugle clarion call on The Glorious Land. Elsewhere, baritone saxophone seems like a more forceful presence than bass guitar, especially on the ominous, drifting All and Everyone.
The quality and depth of feeling of the music here is remarkably consistent, but a few songs stand out nonetheless. On Battleship Hill is remarkable. It veers between a gentle, relaxed strum that might seem twee in any other context and some freer, subliminal moments on which Harvey's high register vocal sounds desperate. It ends with the devastating assessment that 'cruel nature has won again'. It's a startling, unpredictable, deviously clever piece of writing. England is a poignant, melancholy lament that demonstrates the great versatility of Harvey's voice on this album. Here she sounds more ragged and unhinged. Hanging In The Wire is simply beautiful, whilst Written On The Forehead is just disarmingly weird.
PJ Harvey seems to be one of those artists that just seems to get better as she matures. There is a case for her being right up there with Kate Bush and Bjork in the pantheon of great contemporary female artists. Sometimes in the past, her work has tended to be raw to the point of being difficult. Let England Shake is brilliantly realised - a Harvey album that can be loved as much as it can be admired.
Much as I really admire the writing and expertise of Rob Young, I can't help but question his assessment of the new PJ Harvey album in this month's Wire magazine. It's good to read a balanced review that steers clear of hyperbole or cynical attacks but his assertion that Let England Shake feels unfinished feels like a mistake to me. As is often the case with PJ Harvey albums, the music is raw, direct and sometimes combative but to me this feels like one of Harvey's most cohesive and successful artistic statements. It's impressive that so far into a recording career of perhaps surprising longevity, Harvey is continuing to develop and expand her horizons.
Thematically, Let England Shake could be presented as a logical extension of the concerns of its predecessor, 2007's White Chalk. On that album, Harvey seemed preoccupied with images of the English landscape - concerns that seemed to inspire her to traverse new musical terrain too, finding a new, higher vocal register and basing many of the arrangements around her rather rudimentary piano playing (even starker and less finessed than Joanna Newsom's). Some of those thoughts recur - as Harvey sings of the white cliffs of Dover for example - but Let England Shake seems to be aimed at broader concerns. Here, PJ Harvey addresses both imperial history and a war-dominated present, perhaps suggesting that England's glory has been blighted by war.
Few songwriters would have the historical impulse to make reference to the doomed Galipoli campaign, but sometimes Harvey's lyrics feel more impressionistic than some writers have suggested. On 'The Last Living Rose', she risks sounding like a Daily Express leader - 'Goddamn Europeans! Take me back to beautiful England'. Presumably, her attention is ironic, drawing attention the nation's imperial decline (for which reason I'm never quite sure whether she really means England, or is in fact speaking more generally about Britain).
Perhaps the most interesting feature about Let England Shake, the element that most reviews have bafflingly ignored, is how it sounds. Harvey has always had a tremendous gift for getting maximum results from the bare minimum of material. That she seems to do this without ever really repeating herself makes this all the more impressive. Whereas White Chalk foregrounded rudimentary piano, the guitar and Harvey's autoharp are at the heart of Let England Shake. Much of the music is based on very basic strumming patterns - yet it sounds primal and urgent rather than purely reductive. A finely balanced degree of reverb adds to the sense of impending doom.
Another common feature is call and response vocal techniques, which are used to superb effect on both The Glorious Land and The Words That Maketh Murder (on which Mick Harvey joins in), two of Harvey's finest songs to date. Basic rock and roll music is transformed into something more mysterious - something much closer to an English folk tradition.
Harvey also adds elements that seem incongruous - sometimes they are very obviously exactly that. The sample of Niney's Blood and Fire that underpins Written On The Forehead is not matched to the song's pitch or tempo and neither is the bugle clarion call on The Glorious Land. Elsewhere, baritone saxophone seems like a more forceful presence than bass guitar, especially on the ominous, drifting All and Everyone.
The quality and depth of feeling of the music here is remarkably consistent, but a few songs stand out nonetheless. On Battleship Hill is remarkable. It veers between a gentle, relaxed strum that might seem twee in any other context and some freer, subliminal moments on which Harvey's high register vocal sounds desperate. It ends with the devastating assessment that 'cruel nature has won again'. It's a startling, unpredictable, deviously clever piece of writing. England is a poignant, melancholy lament that demonstrates the great versatility of Harvey's voice on this album. Here she sounds more ragged and unhinged. Hanging In The Wire is simply beautiful, whilst Written On The Forehead is just disarmingly weird.
PJ Harvey seems to be one of those artists that just seems to get better as she matures. There is a case for her being right up there with Kate Bush and Bjork in the pantheon of great contemporary female artists. Sometimes in the past, her work has tended to be raw to the point of being difficult. Let England Shake is brilliantly realised - a Harvey album that can be loved as much as it can be admired.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
The Backlash Blues
James Blake - James Blake
In some quarters of the media, the blogosphere and on twitter, James Blake has become a victim of cynicism. It's all very tempting of course - and I've no doubt been guilty of it myself. Given some of the selections that have graced the annual BBC tastemaking polls, it would be easy to dismiss Blake as a novelty or a pastiche merchant. The Quietus have been tweeting seemingly dismissive jokes about his use of autotune, whilst others have candidly decided that this debut album is either dull or indulgent. I had my own suspicions on hearing Blake's cover of Feist's 'Limit To Your Love', but that turns out to be something of a red herring. It's fine enough, but easily the most conventional track here.
What Blake appears to be doing with the rest of the album is something a good deal more ambitious than the Feist cover's take on Massive Attack esque modern soul. There are hints at R&B throughout the rest of the album, but as Blake himself admits, he has also been strongly influenced by the likes of Bon Iver and Laura Marling. Much of this courageous and well defined debut seems to be an attempt to combine the emotional punch of modern folk songwriting with some of the stylistic traits and minimalism of electronic production. In doing this, Blake will wrongfoot some of the admirers of his early EPs which, perhaps misleadingly, had been assumed by many to fall under the dubstep or post-dubstep banner. It's perhaps worth noting at this point that the outstanding Klawierwerke already gave some hint of what was to come on this full length. 'James Blake' the album demonstrates that Blake still has much in common with producers such as Jamie xx or Mount Kimbie, but he is also acutely aware of the power of the human voice and the purity of a simple melody.
Two tracks, both operating largely on the power of repetition and manipulation of a simple phrase, neatly sum up Blake's approach. 'The Wilhelm Scream' is a miniature masterpiece of minimal arrangement - spacious but cumulatively intense. 'I Never Learnt To Share' is similarly electrifying. It's built almost entirely around what seems like a candid confession ('my brother and my sister don't speak to me...but I don't blame them') but which assumes a stranger sentiment in the knowledge that Blake is in fact an only child. Much like 'The Wilhelm Scream', the song has a sense of a gathering storm. Blake generally eschews conventional song structures - these are arranged pieces rather than sets of verses and choruses.
Blake has a strong sense of harmony and rhythm. The gospel and blues undertones to the tantilisingly brief 'Give Me My Month' or the beautiful closer 'Measurements' suggests he has absorbed a far wider range of music than many commetators have given him credit for. He also has a keen sense of sound and a hugely impressive attention to detail that make even his most subtle pieces (such as the two parts of 'Lindisfarne', where his voice is electronically altered) have a depth of feeling and a real strength in commmunication. Anyone who closes their minds and ears to this excellent debut is missing the work of a talented and adventurous musician - one that could have career longevity simply through an ability to move in completely unpredictable directions.
In some quarters of the media, the blogosphere and on twitter, James Blake has become a victim of cynicism. It's all very tempting of course - and I've no doubt been guilty of it myself. Given some of the selections that have graced the annual BBC tastemaking polls, it would be easy to dismiss Blake as a novelty or a pastiche merchant. The Quietus have been tweeting seemingly dismissive jokes about his use of autotune, whilst others have candidly decided that this debut album is either dull or indulgent. I had my own suspicions on hearing Blake's cover of Feist's 'Limit To Your Love', but that turns out to be something of a red herring. It's fine enough, but easily the most conventional track here.
What Blake appears to be doing with the rest of the album is something a good deal more ambitious than the Feist cover's take on Massive Attack esque modern soul. There are hints at R&B throughout the rest of the album, but as Blake himself admits, he has also been strongly influenced by the likes of Bon Iver and Laura Marling. Much of this courageous and well defined debut seems to be an attempt to combine the emotional punch of modern folk songwriting with some of the stylistic traits and minimalism of electronic production. In doing this, Blake will wrongfoot some of the admirers of his early EPs which, perhaps misleadingly, had been assumed by many to fall under the dubstep or post-dubstep banner. It's perhaps worth noting at this point that the outstanding Klawierwerke already gave some hint of what was to come on this full length. 'James Blake' the album demonstrates that Blake still has much in common with producers such as Jamie xx or Mount Kimbie, but he is also acutely aware of the power of the human voice and the purity of a simple melody.
Two tracks, both operating largely on the power of repetition and manipulation of a simple phrase, neatly sum up Blake's approach. 'The Wilhelm Scream' is a miniature masterpiece of minimal arrangement - spacious but cumulatively intense. 'I Never Learnt To Share' is similarly electrifying. It's built almost entirely around what seems like a candid confession ('my brother and my sister don't speak to me...but I don't blame them') but which assumes a stranger sentiment in the knowledge that Blake is in fact an only child. Much like 'The Wilhelm Scream', the song has a sense of a gathering storm. Blake generally eschews conventional song structures - these are arranged pieces rather than sets of verses and choruses.
Blake has a strong sense of harmony and rhythm. The gospel and blues undertones to the tantilisingly brief 'Give Me My Month' or the beautiful closer 'Measurements' suggests he has absorbed a far wider range of music than many commetators have given him credit for. He also has a keen sense of sound and a hugely impressive attention to detail that make even his most subtle pieces (such as the two parts of 'Lindisfarne', where his voice is electronically altered) have a depth of feeling and a real strength in commmunication. Anyone who closes their minds and ears to this excellent debut is missing the work of a talented and adventurous musician - one that could have career longevity simply through an ability to move in completely unpredictable directions.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Alone Together
New Pornographers - Together (Matador)
Kathryn Calder - Are You My Mother? (File Under: Music)
The fifth album from Canadian supergroup New Pornographers appears to have been rather casually dismissed by British rock critics. Perhaps it's simply because it's easy to take a band for granted once they've got five albums into their career. It could be because their previous album, 2007's 'Challengers', with its heavy-handed orchestrations, was a little plodding and overwraught. It's worth stepping back and taking stock though. Did anyone seriously expect that the New Pornographers, a band who hardly ever all appear on one stage at the same time, would manage to produce five albums?
After 'Challengers', 'Together' is quite simply a breath of fresh air. The crisp, crunchy opener 'Moves' provides a timely reminder of just how distinctive and sophisticated a pop songwriter AC Newman is. The album contains some of their most infectious and irresistible songs to date. 'Valkyrie in the Roller Disco' is every bit as glorious as its title - shimmering, shiny and wonderfully slow-building. It may be their finest song. 'Up In The Dark' is pounding power-pop. 'Your Hands (Together)' is a colossal tease - leaving us primed for a full on rock shuffle beat that never arrives. Dan Bejar contributes the delightful jangle of 'Silver Jenny Dollar' and 'If You Can't See My Mirrors'. The sound throughout is colossal - cymbals seem to crash from all directions, the guitars chime beautifully.
'Together' eschews the self-importance that occasionally marred 'Challengers'. It seems that the band have rediscovered their characteristic effervescence. As a consequence, it makes for joyful listening. It's certainly sugary - the New Pornographers remain a band best consumed in small doses. Within itself, this is another fine record with a big, bold sound.
Even better though is the debut solo album from Kathryn Calder, a member both of The New Pornographers and the chronically underrated Immaculate Machine. Calder has done a great job in the New Pornographers in taking over vocal duties in Neko Case's absence at live shows, although her voice is identifiable for being more understated and less imposing than Case's. Whilst 'Are You My Mother?' occasionally traverses similar power-pop terrain to that claimed by her other bands, it's very much an individual, very personal work. It also benefits from a broader dynamic range and greater stylistic diversity. Calder is as comfortable singing a tender piano ballad as she is quixotic, unpredictable indie-pop songs such as 'Slip Away'.
The album was recorded in Calder's childhood home and was thematically informed by the two years Calder spent caring for her terminally ill mother. It can't have been an easy experience to make this music - which is why it's all the more impressive that 'Are You My Mother' is in essence such a life-affirming record. It contains songs of loss and grief ('Arrow', 'Down The River'), but it is also stoical, mature and ultimately hopeful. The lush, determined rush of 'Castor and Pollux' might be the best example of this.
With little in the way of recording technology, the help of a few friends (including members of Ladyhawke, Frog Eyes and New Pornographers), and some household items recycled as percussion instruments, Calder has made a rich, powerful sounding album. Her songwriting is offbeat, melodic and sophisticated. She pays careful attention to instrumentation - the mandolin on 'Follow Me Into The Hills' elevates the song. The ragged percussion gives 'If You Only Knew' an energy and collective spirit. Her melodies flow gracefully in elegant phrases, and her calm, sometimes soothing voice conveys insight. 'Are You My Mother?' is a tremendously accomplished debut that suggests that, with the help of a little publicity, Calder could eclipse the achievements of her colleagues.
Kathryn Calder - Are You My Mother? (File Under: Music)
The fifth album from Canadian supergroup New Pornographers appears to have been rather casually dismissed by British rock critics. Perhaps it's simply because it's easy to take a band for granted once they've got five albums into their career. It could be because their previous album, 2007's 'Challengers', with its heavy-handed orchestrations, was a little plodding and overwraught. It's worth stepping back and taking stock though. Did anyone seriously expect that the New Pornographers, a band who hardly ever all appear on one stage at the same time, would manage to produce five albums?
After 'Challengers', 'Together' is quite simply a breath of fresh air. The crisp, crunchy opener 'Moves' provides a timely reminder of just how distinctive and sophisticated a pop songwriter AC Newman is. The album contains some of their most infectious and irresistible songs to date. 'Valkyrie in the Roller Disco' is every bit as glorious as its title - shimmering, shiny and wonderfully slow-building. It may be their finest song. 'Up In The Dark' is pounding power-pop. 'Your Hands (Together)' is a colossal tease - leaving us primed for a full on rock shuffle beat that never arrives. Dan Bejar contributes the delightful jangle of 'Silver Jenny Dollar' and 'If You Can't See My Mirrors'. The sound throughout is colossal - cymbals seem to crash from all directions, the guitars chime beautifully.
'Together' eschews the self-importance that occasionally marred 'Challengers'. It seems that the band have rediscovered their characteristic effervescence. As a consequence, it makes for joyful listening. It's certainly sugary - the New Pornographers remain a band best consumed in small doses. Within itself, this is another fine record with a big, bold sound.
Even better though is the debut solo album from Kathryn Calder, a member both of The New Pornographers and the chronically underrated Immaculate Machine. Calder has done a great job in the New Pornographers in taking over vocal duties in Neko Case's absence at live shows, although her voice is identifiable for being more understated and less imposing than Case's. Whilst 'Are You My Mother?' occasionally traverses similar power-pop terrain to that claimed by her other bands, it's very much an individual, very personal work. It also benefits from a broader dynamic range and greater stylistic diversity. Calder is as comfortable singing a tender piano ballad as she is quixotic, unpredictable indie-pop songs such as 'Slip Away'.
The album was recorded in Calder's childhood home and was thematically informed by the two years Calder spent caring for her terminally ill mother. It can't have been an easy experience to make this music - which is why it's all the more impressive that 'Are You My Mother' is in essence such a life-affirming record. It contains songs of loss and grief ('Arrow', 'Down The River'), but it is also stoical, mature and ultimately hopeful. The lush, determined rush of 'Castor and Pollux' might be the best example of this.
With little in the way of recording technology, the help of a few friends (including members of Ladyhawke, Frog Eyes and New Pornographers), and some household items recycled as percussion instruments, Calder has made a rich, powerful sounding album. Her songwriting is offbeat, melodic and sophisticated. She pays careful attention to instrumentation - the mandolin on 'Follow Me Into The Hills' elevates the song. The ragged percussion gives 'If You Only Knew' an energy and collective spirit. Her melodies flow gracefully in elegant phrases, and her calm, sometimes soothing voice conveys insight. 'Are You My Mother?' is a tremendously accomplished debut that suggests that, with the help of a little publicity, Calder could eclipse the achievements of her colleagues.
Friday, April 02, 2010
Summer tinged with sadness
Laura Veirs - July Flame (Bella Union)
Laura Veirs is the sort of singer-songwriter it's all too easy to take for granted, releasing new albums of dependable quality at regular intervals without really making radical shifts in direction. Amidst all the noise currently being made around female talents (the elaborate fantasias of Joanna Newsom or the supposed prodigious maturity of Laura Marling), it would be easy for 'July Flame' to fall by the wayside. This would be a real shame, for there's definitely an argument to be made that 'July Flame' is Veirs' most accomplished work.
As its title suggests, 'July Flame' works as a warmer, brighter flipside to the icy charm of her previous career watermark 'Carbon Glacier'. The albums Veirs has released in between the two have all been good, but maybe burdened by the weight of one or two standout songs apiece. 'July Flame' is a good deal more consistent - brimming with largely simple, unaffected but strikingly beautiful songwriting. The arrangements are mostly minimal but characterised by delightful textural nuances.
Veirs continues to work with producer Tucker Martine and 'July Flame' contains the finest results yet from this fruitful collaboration. I became tremendously excited when I heard the news that REM were recording new demos with Martine, for he is exactly the sort of producer to reinject some mystery into that band - but it seems they have returned to the ugly, hyper-compressed commercialism of Jacknife Lee for their forthcoming album. What a shame because judging by what Veirs and Martine have achieved here - an unassuming, home recorded work still full of richness and beauty - a Martine-helmed REM might have been something both surprising and special.
'July Flame' delicately unfolds into a mission of quiet discovery. There's the gentle reverb (applied carefully and thoughtfully) that renders 'I Can See Your Tracks' a mesmerising introduction. There's the otherwordly, slightly woozy waltz of 'Little Deschutes' and the southern gothic tapestry of 'Where Are You Driving?'. Veirs seems to have ironed out some of the harshness from her voice and, whilst these songs are not without her trademark wistful melacholy, they do seem to have a warmer, more enchanted gaze. Perhaps best of all is the sensual, rapturous but avowedly linear title track.
Veirs comes across as a disarmingly modest writer and performer (and her humility comes across in her sincere tribute to legendary session bassist Carol Kaye), but also a meticulously honest one - and this is perhaps why she appears to have so many admirers. Colin Meloy from the Decemberists campaigned for 'July Flame' to get a proper release when Nonesuch records declined to put it out (did they learn nothing from the 'Yankee Hotel Foxtrot' farce?) and Jim James from My Morning Jacket provides some suitably spectral vocal harmonies. It's good to hear James' voice in a more sympathetic context after the uncomfortable fusions of 'Evil Urges'. I suspect 'July Flame' will be one of the albums I listen to most this year, such is its winning combination of adventure and accessibility.
Laura Veirs is the sort of singer-songwriter it's all too easy to take for granted, releasing new albums of dependable quality at regular intervals without really making radical shifts in direction. Amidst all the noise currently being made around female talents (the elaborate fantasias of Joanna Newsom or the supposed prodigious maturity of Laura Marling), it would be easy for 'July Flame' to fall by the wayside. This would be a real shame, for there's definitely an argument to be made that 'July Flame' is Veirs' most accomplished work.
As its title suggests, 'July Flame' works as a warmer, brighter flipside to the icy charm of her previous career watermark 'Carbon Glacier'. The albums Veirs has released in between the two have all been good, but maybe burdened by the weight of one or two standout songs apiece. 'July Flame' is a good deal more consistent - brimming with largely simple, unaffected but strikingly beautiful songwriting. The arrangements are mostly minimal but characterised by delightful textural nuances.
Veirs continues to work with producer Tucker Martine and 'July Flame' contains the finest results yet from this fruitful collaboration. I became tremendously excited when I heard the news that REM were recording new demos with Martine, for he is exactly the sort of producer to reinject some mystery into that band - but it seems they have returned to the ugly, hyper-compressed commercialism of Jacknife Lee for their forthcoming album. What a shame because judging by what Veirs and Martine have achieved here - an unassuming, home recorded work still full of richness and beauty - a Martine-helmed REM might have been something both surprising and special.
'July Flame' delicately unfolds into a mission of quiet discovery. There's the gentle reverb (applied carefully and thoughtfully) that renders 'I Can See Your Tracks' a mesmerising introduction. There's the otherwordly, slightly woozy waltz of 'Little Deschutes' and the southern gothic tapestry of 'Where Are You Driving?'. Veirs seems to have ironed out some of the harshness from her voice and, whilst these songs are not without her trademark wistful melacholy, they do seem to have a warmer, more enchanted gaze. Perhaps best of all is the sensual, rapturous but avowedly linear title track.
Veirs comes across as a disarmingly modest writer and performer (and her humility comes across in her sincere tribute to legendary session bassist Carol Kaye), but also a meticulously honest one - and this is perhaps why she appears to have so many admirers. Colin Meloy from the Decemberists campaigned for 'July Flame' to get a proper release when Nonesuch records declined to put it out (did they learn nothing from the 'Yankee Hotel Foxtrot' farce?) and Jim James from My Morning Jacket provides some suitably spectral vocal harmonies. It's good to hear James' voice in a more sympathetic context after the uncomfortable fusions of 'Evil Urges'. I suspect 'July Flame' will be one of the albums I listen to most this year, such is its winning combination of adventure and accessibility.
Monday, March 08, 2010
Enough To Get You Drunk
Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me (Drag City)
Joanna Newsom seems to be one of those artists about whom writers are incapable of exercising nuance – she’s a polarising figure who has taken to making grand, indulgent and idiosyncratic works that demand to be either loved or hated. There’s little room for indifference. Looking back over my rather cursory review of Joanna Newsom’s last album ‘Ys’, I wasn’t quite as dismissive as I’d thought I’d been, but I did question the lack of perspective and distance deployed in criticism of the record. Music critics (mostly males it must be admitted) seemed to veer into rhapsodic swoons at Newsom’s unrestrained verbosity and the romantic sweep of Van Dyke Parks’ grandiose arrangements.
I’ve been a good deal more agnostic about Newsom. ‘The Milk Eyed Mendor’ had some endearing songs but was undermined by Newsom’s grating childlike whimsy. ‘Ys’, on the other hand, was a bizarre detour into a world of excess. With barely a moment free from the piercing sound of Newsom’s voice, certainly an acquired taste, it seemed to me oppressive and not especially likeable. It was rare to find a record rooted in conventional harmony and folk traditions that also sounded so confrontational and difficult.
‘Have One On Me’ sounds even more daunting on paper – more than two hours of Newsom’s music spread across three CDs! She simply does not know how to edit herself. In reality, though, it’s a much more accessible album than ‘Ys’ and arguably a more artistic one too. There are no Van Dyke Parks arrangements here, instead that responsibility falls to Ryan Francesconi, leader of Newsom’s touring band. The arrangements here are occasionally intricate, but always serve to complement or enhance the song. On five of the eighteen tracks, Newsom even forsakes the harp in favour of the piano. Most importantly, these factors combine to ensure that there is a great range in texture and dynamic that had been largely absent from ‘Ys’.
Also immediately noticeable are the changes in Newsom’s vocal delivery. Apparently she underwent surgery for vocal chord nodules last year – I’m not sure whether it’s this or a conscious decision that has prompted the greater restraint. She now sings with a much greater depth of feeling, poise and soulfulness. Sometimes the delivery is so subtle it’s almost ghostly, a big contrast from Newsom’s previous tendency to impose her personality with unwavering intensity. She still sounds quirky, for sure, but now far more naturally so and much less irritating as a result. There’s also much greater attention paid to phrasing, and there are fewer moments when Newsom seems to be forcing her flighty lyrics to scan. The squeakier, less controlled side of her voice threatens to re-emerge on the third disc, but it sounds more surprising as a result of her control elsewhere.
Newsom also displays a penchant for direct and simple melodies here, as well as her gradually unfolding, lengthy linear narratives that will be familiar to devotees of ‘Ys’. The uncharacteristically concise ‘On A Good Day’ resembles a hymn and elsewhere it sounds as if Newsom might be crafting her own traditional folk songs or nursery rhymes. This is not a criticism – a lot of these songs have direct and clear charm. On much of ‘Have One On Me’, Newsom appears to have developed the artistry and self belief to be simple but not simplistic. It’s pretty clear that she herself recognises the difference.
There’s so much material here it’s hard to know where to start. The most striking tracks are those that present the clearest sense of departure for Newsom. There’s the gently rolling road song ‘Good Intentions Paving Company’, on which Newsom sings with a chorus of her band members, phrasing the vocals in line with the song’s harmonic rhythm. It’s light and bouncy but, for those used to Newsom’s harp and voice based performances, also curiously strident. It also takes a completely unexpected twist into romantic territory as Newsom realises that the long journey has to end somewhere. The song is driven by Newsom’s basic piano style, not unlike Dylan’s untutored gospel touch on ‘New Morning’, and by the limber, creative drumming of Neal Morgan.
Similarly impressive is ‘Baby Birch’, which begins as a plaintive, gospel tinged ballad but gradually builds a delicate momentum, punctuated with bursts of electric guitar. What is most striking here is that, in contrast to pretty much all of ‘Ys’, ‘Baby Birch’ is full of space and calm – moments where Newsom no longer feels she has to browbeat us with linguistic or musical clutter. She has the confidence here to let her ideas unfold slowly and gracefully.
There are many tracks that take off where ‘Ys’ left off. They begin with Newsom alone with her harp, or have her accompanied by a string or woodwind section, and feature dense, sprawling fantasies brimming with alliteration. Disc three probably presents the more challenging of these rapturous fantasias, including the uncompromising, exaggerated ‘Esme’. Perhaps the most successful example is the extraordinary ‘Go Long’, during which no lyrical conceit seems too bizarre or wild for Newsom (she is carried in on a ‘palanquin’ made from the naked bodies of many beautiful women). Her disconcerting intensity is softened, however, by a spine-tingling integrated mesh of harp and kora.
Indeed, the instrumentation throughout hints at a wider range of influences, many of which add texture, depth and nuance to Newsom’s idiosyncratic visions. Andrew Strain’s trombone is a particularly welcome presence, adding warmth and a hint of New Orleans to ‘You and Me, Bess’ and ‘Good Intentions Paving Company’. Newsom’s piano playing, slightly untutored and unsophisticated, has something of the gospel-infused urgency of Dylan’s piano playing on the still underrated ‘New Morning’. The closing ‘Does Not Suffice’ is therefore unexpectedly soulful. The hints of Eastern musical flavours on ‘Kingfisher’ are similarly unpredictable and charming. Newsom’s range on ‘Have One On Me’ is broader and more inclusive.
Lyrically, there are still certainly moments when Newsom’s insistence on luxuriating in language leads to uncomfortable displays of verbose banality (‘her faultlessly etiolated fish-belly face’ on ‘No Provenance’ is a line that sticks out like a sore thumb). However, the overall impression left by ‘Have One On Me’ is that Newsom has balanced her expansive dreamy reveries with a new lyrical directness and self reflection. There’s the affecting pleas at the end of ‘Good Intentions…’ (‘I only want for you to pull over and hold me, til I can’t remember my own name’) and Jackrabbits (‘tell me that I can love you again’), or there’s the preoccupation with the idea of home on songs like ‘In California’ or ‘Autumn’. Then there’s the celebration of drinking, not only confined to the extraordinary title track.
Given that I listened to ‘Ys’ only three times before giving up on it and confining it to the shelves, it’s entirely surprising just how much I’ve wanted to revel in the plethora of ideas and riches on display here. For anyone previously averse to Newsom, I recommend keeping an open mind – ‘Have One On Me’ is indulgent and extravagant for sure, but it’s also deeply touching and brilliantly imaginative. It’s the kind of record no-one else would dare to make. The question, of course, is where she could possibly go from here – one hopes it doesn’t all result in a dreadful hangover.
Joanna Newsom seems to be one of those artists about whom writers are incapable of exercising nuance – she’s a polarising figure who has taken to making grand, indulgent and idiosyncratic works that demand to be either loved or hated. There’s little room for indifference. Looking back over my rather cursory review of Joanna Newsom’s last album ‘Ys’, I wasn’t quite as dismissive as I’d thought I’d been, but I did question the lack of perspective and distance deployed in criticism of the record. Music critics (mostly males it must be admitted) seemed to veer into rhapsodic swoons at Newsom’s unrestrained verbosity and the romantic sweep of Van Dyke Parks’ grandiose arrangements.
I’ve been a good deal more agnostic about Newsom. ‘The Milk Eyed Mendor’ had some endearing songs but was undermined by Newsom’s grating childlike whimsy. ‘Ys’, on the other hand, was a bizarre detour into a world of excess. With barely a moment free from the piercing sound of Newsom’s voice, certainly an acquired taste, it seemed to me oppressive and not especially likeable. It was rare to find a record rooted in conventional harmony and folk traditions that also sounded so confrontational and difficult.
‘Have One On Me’ sounds even more daunting on paper – more than two hours of Newsom’s music spread across three CDs! She simply does not know how to edit herself. In reality, though, it’s a much more accessible album than ‘Ys’ and arguably a more artistic one too. There are no Van Dyke Parks arrangements here, instead that responsibility falls to Ryan Francesconi, leader of Newsom’s touring band. The arrangements here are occasionally intricate, but always serve to complement or enhance the song. On five of the eighteen tracks, Newsom even forsakes the harp in favour of the piano. Most importantly, these factors combine to ensure that there is a great range in texture and dynamic that had been largely absent from ‘Ys’.
Also immediately noticeable are the changes in Newsom’s vocal delivery. Apparently she underwent surgery for vocal chord nodules last year – I’m not sure whether it’s this or a conscious decision that has prompted the greater restraint. She now sings with a much greater depth of feeling, poise and soulfulness. Sometimes the delivery is so subtle it’s almost ghostly, a big contrast from Newsom’s previous tendency to impose her personality with unwavering intensity. She still sounds quirky, for sure, but now far more naturally so and much less irritating as a result. There’s also much greater attention paid to phrasing, and there are fewer moments when Newsom seems to be forcing her flighty lyrics to scan. The squeakier, less controlled side of her voice threatens to re-emerge on the third disc, but it sounds more surprising as a result of her control elsewhere.
Newsom also displays a penchant for direct and simple melodies here, as well as her gradually unfolding, lengthy linear narratives that will be familiar to devotees of ‘Ys’. The uncharacteristically concise ‘On A Good Day’ resembles a hymn and elsewhere it sounds as if Newsom might be crafting her own traditional folk songs or nursery rhymes. This is not a criticism – a lot of these songs have direct and clear charm. On much of ‘Have One On Me’, Newsom appears to have developed the artistry and self belief to be simple but not simplistic. It’s pretty clear that she herself recognises the difference.
There’s so much material here it’s hard to know where to start. The most striking tracks are those that present the clearest sense of departure for Newsom. There’s the gently rolling road song ‘Good Intentions Paving Company’, on which Newsom sings with a chorus of her band members, phrasing the vocals in line with the song’s harmonic rhythm. It’s light and bouncy but, for those used to Newsom’s harp and voice based performances, also curiously strident. It also takes a completely unexpected twist into romantic territory as Newsom realises that the long journey has to end somewhere. The song is driven by Newsom’s basic piano style, not unlike Dylan’s untutored gospel touch on ‘New Morning’, and by the limber, creative drumming of Neal Morgan.
Similarly impressive is ‘Baby Birch’, which begins as a plaintive, gospel tinged ballad but gradually builds a delicate momentum, punctuated with bursts of electric guitar. What is most striking here is that, in contrast to pretty much all of ‘Ys’, ‘Baby Birch’ is full of space and calm – moments where Newsom no longer feels she has to browbeat us with linguistic or musical clutter. She has the confidence here to let her ideas unfold slowly and gracefully.
There are many tracks that take off where ‘Ys’ left off. They begin with Newsom alone with her harp, or have her accompanied by a string or woodwind section, and feature dense, sprawling fantasies brimming with alliteration. Disc three probably presents the more challenging of these rapturous fantasias, including the uncompromising, exaggerated ‘Esme’. Perhaps the most successful example is the extraordinary ‘Go Long’, during which no lyrical conceit seems too bizarre or wild for Newsom (she is carried in on a ‘palanquin’ made from the naked bodies of many beautiful women). Her disconcerting intensity is softened, however, by a spine-tingling integrated mesh of harp and kora.
Indeed, the instrumentation throughout hints at a wider range of influences, many of which add texture, depth and nuance to Newsom’s idiosyncratic visions. Andrew Strain’s trombone is a particularly welcome presence, adding warmth and a hint of New Orleans to ‘You and Me, Bess’ and ‘Good Intentions Paving Company’. Newsom’s piano playing, slightly untutored and unsophisticated, has something of the gospel-infused urgency of Dylan’s piano playing on the still underrated ‘New Morning’. The closing ‘Does Not Suffice’ is therefore unexpectedly soulful. The hints of Eastern musical flavours on ‘Kingfisher’ are similarly unpredictable and charming. Newsom’s range on ‘Have One On Me’ is broader and more inclusive.
Lyrically, there are still certainly moments when Newsom’s insistence on luxuriating in language leads to uncomfortable displays of verbose banality (‘her faultlessly etiolated fish-belly face’ on ‘No Provenance’ is a line that sticks out like a sore thumb). However, the overall impression left by ‘Have One On Me’ is that Newsom has balanced her expansive dreamy reveries with a new lyrical directness and self reflection. There’s the affecting pleas at the end of ‘Good Intentions…’ (‘I only want for you to pull over and hold me, til I can’t remember my own name’) and Jackrabbits (‘tell me that I can love you again’), or there’s the preoccupation with the idea of home on songs like ‘In California’ or ‘Autumn’. Then there’s the celebration of drinking, not only confined to the extraordinary title track.
Given that I listened to ‘Ys’ only three times before giving up on it and confining it to the shelves, it’s entirely surprising just how much I’ve wanted to revel in the plethora of ideas and riches on display here. For anyone previously averse to Newsom, I recommend keeping an open mind – ‘Have One On Me’ is indulgent and extravagant for sure, but it’s also deeply touching and brilliantly imaginative. It’s the kind of record no-one else would dare to make. The question, of course, is where she could possibly go from here – one hopes it doesn’t all result in a dreadful hangover.
Thursday, March 04, 2010
Caught In The Waves
Corinne Bailey Rae - The Sea
The fact that I'm sitting down to write a review of a Corinne Bailey Rae album comes as something of a surprise to me. I should state for the record that I don't have any particular axe to grind with Ms. Rae, it's simply that her debut was far too light and frothy a concoction to really have registered with me, although her Jools Holland performances certainly showed she had vocal talents. Her follow up album 'The Sea' is a totally different story.
It would be very tempting to write about the sad and untimely death of Bailey Rae's partner Jason Rae and how it has informed this album. Whilst it is a record touched by grief and loss, much of the writing had been done before the event, and certain songs have probably been made more poignant by the tragedy. There can be no doubt that this must have affected Bailey Rae tremendously - perhaps some of the pain was poured into completing this surprisingly powerful, dramatic and engaging album. But this is speculation - what seems more important from the context of Bailey Rae's developing career is that she seems to have been left free to make precisely the album she wanted to make. So many different styles inform this liberated, free flowing music. There are hints at Bailey Rae's love of jazz (particularly Billie Holliday records), but also material drawn from the folk world, and even from indie rock. The seductive opener 'Are You Here?' begins with an electric guitar riff that could have been drawn from a PJ Harvey record. Indeed, it comes as something of a surprise to hear Bailey Rae's soft, playful vocal delivery over it.
This sophisticated, superbly executed music is quite some way from the coffee table blandness with which Bailey Rae has been, perhaps unfairly, associated. It's a record that suggests that of all the recent heavily hyped, BBC sound-of-the-year approved female solo artists, Bailey Rae may well turn out to be the one with long term artistic potential. Artists that spring to mind when listening to 'The Sea' include Joni Mitchell, John Martyn and Terry Callier - the kind of solo artists that blurred genre boundaries with effortless, intoxicating ease.
Even the single 'I'd Do It All Again', itself a powerfully linear, deeply expressed and passionate song, gives little indication of the quality of the writing and the ensemble performances on 'The Sea'. The music is sensitively delivered and thoughtfully textured. A song like 'Feels Like The First Time', which initially threatens to be generic summery funk-lite unfolds to reveal a slightly exotic, menacing chorus with vaguely threatening string lines.
More surprising are the upbeat, sultry and insistent pieces such as 'The Blackest Lily'. With Hammond organ and spiky electric guitar, the song has a slightly retro vibe, but everything about the delivery is so righteous and confident that it ends up being thoroughly irresistible. Perhaps the breezy pop of 'Paris Nights/New York Mornings' is slightly out of place on an otherwise intense and rapturous set of songs, but the sheer panache of the band performances make it seem necessary.
Perhaps the album's greatest strengths lie in its lush, rhapsodic ballads, which are emotional without becoming histrionic. Bailey Rae has a control and delicacy that suggests turmoil in the most unforced and convincing of ways. 'I Would Like To Call It Beauty' is particularly beautiful - sensual and gentle but compelling from start to finish, whilst 'Love's On Its Way' gradually builds into something somehow both overwhelming and underplayed. The closing title track is aptly named - the sensation of listening to it is akin to being washed with waves of water. It feels like writing it may have been a cathartic, purgatorial experience.
There will always be some people for whom Bailey Rae is just not edgy enough a personality. Yet these people will miss out by unfairly ignoring this excellent album. Whilst her soft, sometimes childlike vocals could sit very comfortably in lightweight presentation, the contexts Bailey Rae has chosen here are a good deal more mature and adventurous. A great deal of attention has been paid to the detail of the arrangements and the sounds of particular instruments and to the overall mood. 'The Sea' is an elemental triumph.
The fact that I'm sitting down to write a review of a Corinne Bailey Rae album comes as something of a surprise to me. I should state for the record that I don't have any particular axe to grind with Ms. Rae, it's simply that her debut was far too light and frothy a concoction to really have registered with me, although her Jools Holland performances certainly showed she had vocal talents. Her follow up album 'The Sea' is a totally different story.
It would be very tempting to write about the sad and untimely death of Bailey Rae's partner Jason Rae and how it has informed this album. Whilst it is a record touched by grief and loss, much of the writing had been done before the event, and certain songs have probably been made more poignant by the tragedy. There can be no doubt that this must have affected Bailey Rae tremendously - perhaps some of the pain was poured into completing this surprisingly powerful, dramatic and engaging album. But this is speculation - what seems more important from the context of Bailey Rae's developing career is that she seems to have been left free to make precisely the album she wanted to make. So many different styles inform this liberated, free flowing music. There are hints at Bailey Rae's love of jazz (particularly Billie Holliday records), but also material drawn from the folk world, and even from indie rock. The seductive opener 'Are You Here?' begins with an electric guitar riff that could have been drawn from a PJ Harvey record. Indeed, it comes as something of a surprise to hear Bailey Rae's soft, playful vocal delivery over it.
This sophisticated, superbly executed music is quite some way from the coffee table blandness with which Bailey Rae has been, perhaps unfairly, associated. It's a record that suggests that of all the recent heavily hyped, BBC sound-of-the-year approved female solo artists, Bailey Rae may well turn out to be the one with long term artistic potential. Artists that spring to mind when listening to 'The Sea' include Joni Mitchell, John Martyn and Terry Callier - the kind of solo artists that blurred genre boundaries with effortless, intoxicating ease.
Even the single 'I'd Do It All Again', itself a powerfully linear, deeply expressed and passionate song, gives little indication of the quality of the writing and the ensemble performances on 'The Sea'. The music is sensitively delivered and thoughtfully textured. A song like 'Feels Like The First Time', which initially threatens to be generic summery funk-lite unfolds to reveal a slightly exotic, menacing chorus with vaguely threatening string lines.
More surprising are the upbeat, sultry and insistent pieces such as 'The Blackest Lily'. With Hammond organ and spiky electric guitar, the song has a slightly retro vibe, but everything about the delivery is so righteous and confident that it ends up being thoroughly irresistible. Perhaps the breezy pop of 'Paris Nights/New York Mornings' is slightly out of place on an otherwise intense and rapturous set of songs, but the sheer panache of the band performances make it seem necessary.
Perhaps the album's greatest strengths lie in its lush, rhapsodic ballads, which are emotional without becoming histrionic. Bailey Rae has a control and delicacy that suggests turmoil in the most unforced and convincing of ways. 'I Would Like To Call It Beauty' is particularly beautiful - sensual and gentle but compelling from start to finish, whilst 'Love's On Its Way' gradually builds into something somehow both overwhelming and underplayed. The closing title track is aptly named - the sensation of listening to it is akin to being washed with waves of water. It feels like writing it may have been a cathartic, purgatorial experience.
There will always be some people for whom Bailey Rae is just not edgy enough a personality. Yet these people will miss out by unfairly ignoring this excellent album. Whilst her soft, sometimes childlike vocals could sit very comfortably in lightweight presentation, the contexts Bailey Rae has chosen here are a good deal more mature and adventurous. A great deal of attention has been paid to the detail of the arrangements and the sounds of particular instruments and to the overall mood. 'The Sea' is an elemental triumph.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Orchestral Manouevres In the Dark
Peter Gabriel - Scratch My Back (Realworld)
For those who have us who have been waiting for ‘I/O’, the new album of original material Peter Gabriel has been promising for the past eight years, his ‘song exchange’ project ‘Scratch My Back’ is somewhat unexpected. For some, it will no doubt also be frustrating. It is now conventional for the covers album to be seen as a disappointment, a sign of diminishing creative powers or an abrogation of artistic responsibilities. This is something that always irritates me given the importance of the art of interpretation in the development of popular music.
In Peter Gabriel’s case, there’s a strong argument to be made that ‘Scratch My Back’ is the most radical move he could have made. Although his previous two albums ‘Us’ and ‘Up’ came spaced far apart, they gave a strong sense of consistent artistic preoccupations. Gabriel was fascinated by sound, by linear song structure and by a wide variety of music from around the world. He had developed a perfectionist streak in his own private studio and would rework his compositions for as long as he felt it necessary to tinker and tweak. He was also becoming strongly associated with personal, confessional lyrics, which added a human dimension to what could easily have been made for alienating listening. Both albums are brilliant and original – but I wonder what more of the same would have added to our understanding of this most underrated of artists.
Given the extent to which Gabriel’s sound is associated with his regular rhythm section (not least bassist Tony Levin and his customised ‘funk fingers’), recording an album without drums, guitar or electric bass and with an orchestra represents a substantial departure. For the most part, the orchestrations on ‘Scratch My Back’, by John Metcalfe, are not particularly adventurous, although sometimes stirring, sitting squarely in film soundtrack territory. It therefore falls more to Gabriel’s strengths and limitations as a singer to determine which of these musical settings work and which do not. His voice has not sounded this exposed since ‘Here Comes the Flood’ on his debut solo recording. Sometimes the results are grandiose or schmaltzy, but on other occasions, Gabriel finds a restrained and dignified sense of reflection and regret in his material.
Although its title suggests there is something lighthearted, entertaining, perhaps even humorous about this project, but the album that Gabriel has produced is unflinchingly earnest and sincere. Whilst he alters the mood of many of these songs, he also treats them with tremendous reverence. His aim seems to have been to strip these songs of the trappings of their original productions and amplify the emotions beneath the artifice. This is a bit difficult to achieve with a selection such as Neil Young’s wonderful ‘Philadelphia’, which was all about naked simplicity and vulnerability in the first place, the song demonstrating considerably more artistry than the film it soundtracked. Gabriel speeds up the temp slightly and makes the phrasing more precise, meaning that there’s less lilt and gentle swing. The orchestrations eventually drown both the melody and the purpose of the song. Similarly, it’s hard to add additional dense arrangements to Arcade Fire’s ‘My Body Is a Cage’, hardly a song that could have been much more portentous in its original guise. Somehow Gabriel succeeds in making it so however, although he finds something more intimate and restrained in the song’s coda.
There are moments, however, when his approach works to startling and transformative effect. With Radiohead’s ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’, he alters the phrasing of the vocal in the opposite way from ‘Philadelphia’, protracting the lines and finding the song’s inherent sadness and claustrophobia. His voice is cracked and wayward here. He’s by no means the most technically gifted of singers, but his voice has rarely been used so compellingly as an instrument before. Regina Spektor’s ‘Apres Moi’ sounds enticing when stripped of her indulgent kookiness, whilst Elbow’s ‘Mirrorball’ sounds a good deal more mysterious and elegant when divorced from Guy Garvey’s homely blokiness. It’s one of the more slippery and elusive songs here, and Gabriel handles its subtleties adroitly.
Best of all surely must be the lush, captivating take on Bon Iver’s ‘Flume’. This somehow retains all the passion and the emotion of the original, adding theatricality and drama but removing Justin Vernon’s trademark vocal trickery. It helps that this results in a clearer communication of the lyric. Gabriel completely inhabits this song, sounding at once powerful and mournful. This is a tremendous reading of an already excellent song.
Elsewhere, the situation is more complicated than merely a matter of straightforward success of failure. Removing the joyful township spirit of Paul Simon’s ‘The Boy In The Bubble’ radically alters its mood and feeling, although I can’t help feeling that this slow motion version is a little too soporific. The success of the version of The Magnetic Fields’ ‘The Book of Love’ depends on whether or not Stephin Merritt’s songs work when his layers of irony are peeled away. Some will find this conversational take sweet and endearing, others may feel it is sentimental. The piano-lead take on Randy Newman’s ‘I Think It’s Going to Rain Today’ is arguably too faithful and certainly pales into insignificance when placed against Nina Simone’s magisterial version. Uncharacteristically, Gabriel overdoes the forced emoting at the outset of his version of Bowie’s ‘Heroes’, but the song magically comes alive with the introduction of a Steve Reich-esque string figure. This in turn allows Gabriel’s voice to take full, natural flight.
By some distance the most surprising setting is a de-funked, chamber take on Talking Heads’ alarmingly prophetic ‘Listening Wind’. It’s the one that seems least likely to work given how much Talking Heads songs tended to rely on their spindly, angular grooves. Gabriel’s reading emphasises the importance of David Byrne’s vocal phrasing, and his ear for an engaging melody.
‘Scratch My Back’ is by no means a masterpiece, but it is an important addition to the catalogue of a major artist. Bob Ezrin, far better known as a fairly blustery rock producer, but who of course worked wonders on Lou Reed's 'Berlin', has captured the orchestral sound effortlessly, although I would have preferred it had the orchestrations focussed more on texture and colour and less on cinematic sweep. Nevertheless, Gabriel has pushed himself outside his usual comfort zone. The results are mixed, but never less than interesting.
For those who have us who have been waiting for ‘I/O’, the new album of original material Peter Gabriel has been promising for the past eight years, his ‘song exchange’ project ‘Scratch My Back’ is somewhat unexpected. For some, it will no doubt also be frustrating. It is now conventional for the covers album to be seen as a disappointment, a sign of diminishing creative powers or an abrogation of artistic responsibilities. This is something that always irritates me given the importance of the art of interpretation in the development of popular music.
In Peter Gabriel’s case, there’s a strong argument to be made that ‘Scratch My Back’ is the most radical move he could have made. Although his previous two albums ‘Us’ and ‘Up’ came spaced far apart, they gave a strong sense of consistent artistic preoccupations. Gabriel was fascinated by sound, by linear song structure and by a wide variety of music from around the world. He had developed a perfectionist streak in his own private studio and would rework his compositions for as long as he felt it necessary to tinker and tweak. He was also becoming strongly associated with personal, confessional lyrics, which added a human dimension to what could easily have been made for alienating listening. Both albums are brilliant and original – but I wonder what more of the same would have added to our understanding of this most underrated of artists.
Given the extent to which Gabriel’s sound is associated with his regular rhythm section (not least bassist Tony Levin and his customised ‘funk fingers’), recording an album without drums, guitar or electric bass and with an orchestra represents a substantial departure. For the most part, the orchestrations on ‘Scratch My Back’, by John Metcalfe, are not particularly adventurous, although sometimes stirring, sitting squarely in film soundtrack territory. It therefore falls more to Gabriel’s strengths and limitations as a singer to determine which of these musical settings work and which do not. His voice has not sounded this exposed since ‘Here Comes the Flood’ on his debut solo recording. Sometimes the results are grandiose or schmaltzy, but on other occasions, Gabriel finds a restrained and dignified sense of reflection and regret in his material.
Although its title suggests there is something lighthearted, entertaining, perhaps even humorous about this project, but the album that Gabriel has produced is unflinchingly earnest and sincere. Whilst he alters the mood of many of these songs, he also treats them with tremendous reverence. His aim seems to have been to strip these songs of the trappings of their original productions and amplify the emotions beneath the artifice. This is a bit difficult to achieve with a selection such as Neil Young’s wonderful ‘Philadelphia’, which was all about naked simplicity and vulnerability in the first place, the song demonstrating considerably more artistry than the film it soundtracked. Gabriel speeds up the temp slightly and makes the phrasing more precise, meaning that there’s less lilt and gentle swing. The orchestrations eventually drown both the melody and the purpose of the song. Similarly, it’s hard to add additional dense arrangements to Arcade Fire’s ‘My Body Is a Cage’, hardly a song that could have been much more portentous in its original guise. Somehow Gabriel succeeds in making it so however, although he finds something more intimate and restrained in the song’s coda.
There are moments, however, when his approach works to startling and transformative effect. With Radiohead’s ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’, he alters the phrasing of the vocal in the opposite way from ‘Philadelphia’, protracting the lines and finding the song’s inherent sadness and claustrophobia. His voice is cracked and wayward here. He’s by no means the most technically gifted of singers, but his voice has rarely been used so compellingly as an instrument before. Regina Spektor’s ‘Apres Moi’ sounds enticing when stripped of her indulgent kookiness, whilst Elbow’s ‘Mirrorball’ sounds a good deal more mysterious and elegant when divorced from Guy Garvey’s homely blokiness. It’s one of the more slippery and elusive songs here, and Gabriel handles its subtleties adroitly.
Best of all surely must be the lush, captivating take on Bon Iver’s ‘Flume’. This somehow retains all the passion and the emotion of the original, adding theatricality and drama but removing Justin Vernon’s trademark vocal trickery. It helps that this results in a clearer communication of the lyric. Gabriel completely inhabits this song, sounding at once powerful and mournful. This is a tremendous reading of an already excellent song.
Elsewhere, the situation is more complicated than merely a matter of straightforward success of failure. Removing the joyful township spirit of Paul Simon’s ‘The Boy In The Bubble’ radically alters its mood and feeling, although I can’t help feeling that this slow motion version is a little too soporific. The success of the version of The Magnetic Fields’ ‘The Book of Love’ depends on whether or not Stephin Merritt’s songs work when his layers of irony are peeled away. Some will find this conversational take sweet and endearing, others may feel it is sentimental. The piano-lead take on Randy Newman’s ‘I Think It’s Going to Rain Today’ is arguably too faithful and certainly pales into insignificance when placed against Nina Simone’s magisterial version. Uncharacteristically, Gabriel overdoes the forced emoting at the outset of his version of Bowie’s ‘Heroes’, but the song magically comes alive with the introduction of a Steve Reich-esque string figure. This in turn allows Gabriel’s voice to take full, natural flight.
By some distance the most surprising setting is a de-funked, chamber take on Talking Heads’ alarmingly prophetic ‘Listening Wind’. It’s the one that seems least likely to work given how much Talking Heads songs tended to rely on their spindly, angular grooves. Gabriel’s reading emphasises the importance of David Byrne’s vocal phrasing, and his ear for an engaging melody.
‘Scratch My Back’ is by no means a masterpiece, but it is an important addition to the catalogue of a major artist. Bob Ezrin, far better known as a fairly blustery rock producer, but who of course worked wonders on Lou Reed's 'Berlin', has captured the orchestral sound effortlessly, although I would have preferred it had the orchestrations focussed more on texture and colour and less on cinematic sweep. Nevertheless, Gabriel has pushed himself outside his usual comfort zone. The results are mixed, but never less than interesting.
Friday, February 05, 2010
Bruised but Unbeaten
Gil Scott Heron - I'm New Here (XL Recordings)
This intriguing comeback from Gil Scott Heron is actually an incredibly difficult album to review. Scott Heron has arguably never made a bad record – even his last release, 1994’s ‘Spirits’, had its moments. Whilst ‘I’m New Here’ belatedly continues the quality streak, it stands alone in Scott Heron’s catalogue in terms of its sound and instrumentation. Yet it’s faintly ludicrous to applaud it for ‘incorporating hip-hop’ when, along with the Last Poets, Scott Heron is one of the founding fathers of rap. XL boss Richard Russell’s production therefore represents a sensitive and logical modernisation, rather than a forced or unnecessary one.
The sonic environment Russell has crafted for Scott Heron may not actually be all that radical. His claustrophobic, sinister but minimalist combination of strings and beats could easily have come from a Massive Attack album. He at least seems to be a good deal more creative with such backing tracks than Massive Attack themselves are these days. His accompaniments take Scott Heron away from his natural comfort zone without making him sound distant or uncomfortable. There’s no Fender Rhodes piano or live percussion and no attempt to smooth over the rough, nervy reality of Scott Heron’s words. The jazz lineage (the world of ‘lady Day and John Coltrane’) may have been sacrificed – but the results are suitably dank and fearsome.
What is most interesting about this record though is Scott Heron’s voice, which now sounds deeper and more resonant, but somehow simultaneously more weathered and dry. He now sounds like a man who has been through a tough prison sentence and various drug rehabilitation programmes. In this sense, the musical backings work remarkably well, given that they are atmospheric but unobtrusive – allowing that peculiar but powerful voice space to communicate.
This set supremely reaffirms Scott Heron’s talents as a performance poet. It is full of interludes and brief skits which complement the flow of the overall album rather than interrupt it. It is bookended by two parts of an autobiographical tale entitled ‘On Coming From A Broken Home’ in which Scott Heron’s elaborate language is as rich and evocative as the sound of his voice. Even more intense is the stark, pounding ‘Running’, which seems confessional in light of Scott Heron’s recent life experience.
The album is rather dominated by the choice of covers, which leads to obvious comparisons with Rick Rubin’s rehabilitation of Johnny Cash’s career. Yet, to hear Johnny Cash singing with acoustic instrumentation was not surprising. To hear Scott Heron doing it on the surprisingly effective version of Smog’s ‘I’m New Here’ is rather radical and unexpected. The song’s combination of irony and honesty is the perfect vehicle for Scott Heron’s resurrection, with its brilliant chat up lines (‘I met a woman in a bar and told her I was hard to get to know, but damn near impossible to forget’) and self-reflection (‘I had an ego the size of Texas. I forget –does that mean big or small?’).
Perhaps less unexpected are versions of Robert Johnson’s ‘Me and The Devil’, relocated from the Mississippi Delta to a paranoid urban environment, and an ostensibly soft take on Bobby Bland’s ‘I’ll Take Care Of You’. Here, Scott Heron’s harsh voice suggests not compassion or commitment – but rather defiance and conviction.
The only original ‘song’ here – ‘New York Is Killing Me’ – is excellent, and suggests that there may be much more to come from this resurrected artist. Set to a handclap backing reminiscent of the Dixie Cups’ ‘Iko Iko’, the accompanying vocal is anything but lightweight, actually weighed down by its burdensome natural gravitas.
I’ve long had reservations with the image of Scott Heron as a prophet of equality and human rights, given his early song ‘The Subject Was Faggots’, a rather unpleasant piece of observational writing. Perhaps now that he has singlehandedly failed to take his own advice (having fallen victim to the very drink and drugs he warned so gravely about) we can now see him in a different, more nuanced light. On ‘I’m New Here’ he seems defiant, but also wiser and slightly vulnerable too. This is an unexpected, powerful return to the real world.
This intriguing comeback from Gil Scott Heron is actually an incredibly difficult album to review. Scott Heron has arguably never made a bad record – even his last release, 1994’s ‘Spirits’, had its moments. Whilst ‘I’m New Here’ belatedly continues the quality streak, it stands alone in Scott Heron’s catalogue in terms of its sound and instrumentation. Yet it’s faintly ludicrous to applaud it for ‘incorporating hip-hop’ when, along with the Last Poets, Scott Heron is one of the founding fathers of rap. XL boss Richard Russell’s production therefore represents a sensitive and logical modernisation, rather than a forced or unnecessary one.
The sonic environment Russell has crafted for Scott Heron may not actually be all that radical. His claustrophobic, sinister but minimalist combination of strings and beats could easily have come from a Massive Attack album. He at least seems to be a good deal more creative with such backing tracks than Massive Attack themselves are these days. His accompaniments take Scott Heron away from his natural comfort zone without making him sound distant or uncomfortable. There’s no Fender Rhodes piano or live percussion and no attempt to smooth over the rough, nervy reality of Scott Heron’s words. The jazz lineage (the world of ‘lady Day and John Coltrane’) may have been sacrificed – but the results are suitably dank and fearsome.
What is most interesting about this record though is Scott Heron’s voice, which now sounds deeper and more resonant, but somehow simultaneously more weathered and dry. He now sounds like a man who has been through a tough prison sentence and various drug rehabilitation programmes. In this sense, the musical backings work remarkably well, given that they are atmospheric but unobtrusive – allowing that peculiar but powerful voice space to communicate.
This set supremely reaffirms Scott Heron’s talents as a performance poet. It is full of interludes and brief skits which complement the flow of the overall album rather than interrupt it. It is bookended by two parts of an autobiographical tale entitled ‘On Coming From A Broken Home’ in which Scott Heron’s elaborate language is as rich and evocative as the sound of his voice. Even more intense is the stark, pounding ‘Running’, which seems confessional in light of Scott Heron’s recent life experience.
The album is rather dominated by the choice of covers, which leads to obvious comparisons with Rick Rubin’s rehabilitation of Johnny Cash’s career. Yet, to hear Johnny Cash singing with acoustic instrumentation was not surprising. To hear Scott Heron doing it on the surprisingly effective version of Smog’s ‘I’m New Here’ is rather radical and unexpected. The song’s combination of irony and honesty is the perfect vehicle for Scott Heron’s resurrection, with its brilliant chat up lines (‘I met a woman in a bar and told her I was hard to get to know, but damn near impossible to forget’) and self-reflection (‘I had an ego the size of Texas. I forget –does that mean big or small?’).
Perhaps less unexpected are versions of Robert Johnson’s ‘Me and The Devil’, relocated from the Mississippi Delta to a paranoid urban environment, and an ostensibly soft take on Bobby Bland’s ‘I’ll Take Care Of You’. Here, Scott Heron’s harsh voice suggests not compassion or commitment – but rather defiance and conviction.
The only original ‘song’ here – ‘New York Is Killing Me’ – is excellent, and suggests that there may be much more to come from this resurrected artist. Set to a handclap backing reminiscent of the Dixie Cups’ ‘Iko Iko’, the accompanying vocal is anything but lightweight, actually weighed down by its burdensome natural gravitas.
I’ve long had reservations with the image of Scott Heron as a prophet of equality and human rights, given his early song ‘The Subject Was Faggots’, a rather unpleasant piece of observational writing. Perhaps now that he has singlehandedly failed to take his own advice (having fallen victim to the very drink and drugs he warned so gravely about) we can now see him in a different, more nuanced light. On ‘I’m New Here’ he seems defiant, but also wiser and slightly vulnerable too. This is an unexpected, powerful return to the real world.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Insincerity
The Magnetic Fields - Realism (Nonesuch)
Anyone who still thinks that Americans don’t get irony should be pointed to the work of Stephin Merritt immediately. In fact, in titling the latest Magnetic Fields album ‘Realism’, Merritt has taken his laconic wit to new levels. As ever, Merritt is being slippery and disingenuous here – there’s no greater level of sincerity or honesty than on previous Magnetic Fields albums, and plenty of familiar wordplay and dry humour.
In packaging design and sonic intent, ‘Realism’ is clearly intended as a flip side to the Jesus and Mary Chain-inspired ‘Distortion’. It dispenses not only with that album’s overpowering swathes of noise, but also with all synthesisers, using only acoustic instruments. There’s an obvious problem here that few critics seem to have observed, namely that Merritt has used this particular sonic conceit before, on the album ‘i’. The two albums are not identical by any means – on ‘I’ Merritt sang every song, whereas here he makes bountiful use of guest vocalist Shirley Simms. ‘Realism’ also pays more explicit debts to folk music, and not every song title begins with the letter ‘I’. The similarities probably outweigh the differences though – and there will be no great surprises here for long term followers of Merritt’s work. It’s probably fair to say that this is symptomatic of a wider malaise. Merritt’s magnum opus ’69 Love Songs’ was both an ambitious undertaking and a massive success. Understandably, he has struggled to know exactly how to better it.
This doesn’t mean that the subsequent Magnetic Fields projects have been bad – to the contrary, there are some excellent songs spread across them. It’s just that none has seemed quite so conceptually and musically compelling, or as uniquely ludicrous. It’s actually Merritt’s side projects, the fascinating ‘Showtunes’ album and the musical interpretation of the Lemony Snicket books as The Gothic Archies, which have provided more original and adventurous takes on his by now familiar songwriting tropes.
‘Realism’, then, is another adequate Magnetic Fields album, albeit one that focuses more on Merritt’s purposeful parodies than on his best pop writing. I always feel Magnetic Fields songs are best when they can be interpreted either as ironic commentaries (as the famously acerbic Merritt no doubt intended them), or as pithy expressions of identifiable and real human experience. ‘The Book of Love’ works like this, hence Peter Gabriel was able to cover it as a disarmingly straight (in more than one sense), string-laden ballad for his forthcoming ‘Scratch My Back’ project (quite what Gabriel song Merritt plans to deconstruct in return is anyone’s guess). The first half of ‘Realism’ favours unashamedly silly, nursery rhyme-esque ditties like ‘We Are Having A Hootenanny’ (‘get the lowdown on our hoedown’), ‘The Dolls’ Tea Party’ and ‘Everything is One Big Christmas Tree’. The latter, hilariously, even has its entire lyric repeated in a high-camp German chorus. They are fun, but the appeal is limited, and the acoustic instrumentation, somewhat inevitably when xylophones and glockenspiels are involved, makes them seem a bit plinky plonk.
Luckily, the front half also includes two prime examples of Merritt’s genius, two songs that pull of the neat trick of somehow being endearing and thoroughly charmless at the same time. ‘I Don’t Know What To Say’ is touchingly vulnerable and drenched in surprisingly effective reverb. With its knowing devaluations of romantic clichés, it could have sat comfortably on ’69 Love Songs’. Even better is ‘You Must Be Out of Your Mind’ (followed in the chorus by the brilliantly chastising, patronising word ‘son’). As other reviewers have already noted, it features one of Merritt’s great lyrics in ‘I want you crawling back to me, down on your knees, yeah/Like an appendectomy, sans anasthaesia’.
The best songs here seem to be the most laconic – ‘Walk A Lonely Road’, ‘Better Things’, the accordion-laden ‘From a Sinking Boat’ and Shirley Simms’ wilting vocal on ‘Always Already Gone’ certainly stand out. Merritt’s attempts to balance these with jauntier moments seem to fall flat. ‘The Dada Polka’ irritatingly and inescapably reminds me of Boney M. Wryly amusing though the lyric is, the mock-baroque stylings of ‘Seduced and Abandoned’ have been repeated ad nauseam by Merritt now.
‘Realism’ is a continuation of Merritt’s dogged, largely unchanging path. He sings of ‘real’ rather than ‘absurd’ birds, accompanying his vocals with cheesy sampled birdsong. This album dependably overflows with lyrical and musical conceits. The most radical thing for him to do now would be to record something completely sincere.
Anyone who still thinks that Americans don’t get irony should be pointed to the work of Stephin Merritt immediately. In fact, in titling the latest Magnetic Fields album ‘Realism’, Merritt has taken his laconic wit to new levels. As ever, Merritt is being slippery and disingenuous here – there’s no greater level of sincerity or honesty than on previous Magnetic Fields albums, and plenty of familiar wordplay and dry humour.
In packaging design and sonic intent, ‘Realism’ is clearly intended as a flip side to the Jesus and Mary Chain-inspired ‘Distortion’. It dispenses not only with that album’s overpowering swathes of noise, but also with all synthesisers, using only acoustic instruments. There’s an obvious problem here that few critics seem to have observed, namely that Merritt has used this particular sonic conceit before, on the album ‘i’. The two albums are not identical by any means – on ‘I’ Merritt sang every song, whereas here he makes bountiful use of guest vocalist Shirley Simms. ‘Realism’ also pays more explicit debts to folk music, and not every song title begins with the letter ‘I’. The similarities probably outweigh the differences though – and there will be no great surprises here for long term followers of Merritt’s work. It’s probably fair to say that this is symptomatic of a wider malaise. Merritt’s magnum opus ’69 Love Songs’ was both an ambitious undertaking and a massive success. Understandably, he has struggled to know exactly how to better it.
This doesn’t mean that the subsequent Magnetic Fields projects have been bad – to the contrary, there are some excellent songs spread across them. It’s just that none has seemed quite so conceptually and musically compelling, or as uniquely ludicrous. It’s actually Merritt’s side projects, the fascinating ‘Showtunes’ album and the musical interpretation of the Lemony Snicket books as The Gothic Archies, which have provided more original and adventurous takes on his by now familiar songwriting tropes.
‘Realism’, then, is another adequate Magnetic Fields album, albeit one that focuses more on Merritt’s purposeful parodies than on his best pop writing. I always feel Magnetic Fields songs are best when they can be interpreted either as ironic commentaries (as the famously acerbic Merritt no doubt intended them), or as pithy expressions of identifiable and real human experience. ‘The Book of Love’ works like this, hence Peter Gabriel was able to cover it as a disarmingly straight (in more than one sense), string-laden ballad for his forthcoming ‘Scratch My Back’ project (quite what Gabriel song Merritt plans to deconstruct in return is anyone’s guess). The first half of ‘Realism’ favours unashamedly silly, nursery rhyme-esque ditties like ‘We Are Having A Hootenanny’ (‘get the lowdown on our hoedown’), ‘The Dolls’ Tea Party’ and ‘Everything is One Big Christmas Tree’. The latter, hilariously, even has its entire lyric repeated in a high-camp German chorus. They are fun, but the appeal is limited, and the acoustic instrumentation, somewhat inevitably when xylophones and glockenspiels are involved, makes them seem a bit plinky plonk.
Luckily, the front half also includes two prime examples of Merritt’s genius, two songs that pull of the neat trick of somehow being endearing and thoroughly charmless at the same time. ‘I Don’t Know What To Say’ is touchingly vulnerable and drenched in surprisingly effective reverb. With its knowing devaluations of romantic clichés, it could have sat comfortably on ’69 Love Songs’. Even better is ‘You Must Be Out of Your Mind’ (followed in the chorus by the brilliantly chastising, patronising word ‘son’). As other reviewers have already noted, it features one of Merritt’s great lyrics in ‘I want you crawling back to me, down on your knees, yeah/Like an appendectomy, sans anasthaesia’.
The best songs here seem to be the most laconic – ‘Walk A Lonely Road’, ‘Better Things’, the accordion-laden ‘From a Sinking Boat’ and Shirley Simms’ wilting vocal on ‘Always Already Gone’ certainly stand out. Merritt’s attempts to balance these with jauntier moments seem to fall flat. ‘The Dada Polka’ irritatingly and inescapably reminds me of Boney M. Wryly amusing though the lyric is, the mock-baroque stylings of ‘Seduced and Abandoned’ have been repeated ad nauseam by Merritt now.
‘Realism’ is a continuation of Merritt’s dogged, largely unchanging path. He sings of ‘real’ rather than ‘absurd’ birds, accompanying his vocals with cheesy sampled birdsong. This album dependably overflows with lyrical and musical conceits. The most radical thing for him to do now would be to record something completely sincere.
Friday, January 15, 2010
A Solipcist's Prayer Meeting
Bill Fay – Still Some Light (Coptic Cat)
I should probably warn at the outset that this is likely to be a somewhat confused and disoriented piece of writing, the British singer-songwriter Bill Fay having been a musical infatuation of mine for a while now. I chanced upon the See For Miles reissue of his two albums originally made for Decca in the early 1970s in my local library some time in the early years of the last decade. I picked it up purely on the basis that I knew nothing about Fay and because the original cover images were striking. Later, when working on a piece on Fay for John Kell’s Unpredictable Same fanzine, I discovered that Fay was also being championed elsewhere. MOJO’s Jim Irvin had drawn attention to these classic, underappreciated albums, whilst Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy had been performing Fay’s ‘Be Not So Fearful’ in his solo concerts, having been introduced to the Decca albums by Jim O’Rourke.
After his Decca contract folded, Fay had not, as many imagined disappeared, but had continued to write and record music at home, away from the commercial imperatives of the music industry. Some of this was released by David Tibet on Current 93 on the excellent, spacious and mysterious ‘Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow’ set. It’s entirely probable that, much like the home tapes of the late, great Arthur Russell, there may be numerous unheard Fay recordings that are worthy of release.
‘Still Some Light’ contains the first brand new Fay recordings for over thirty years, recorded alone at home. It is packaged, delightfully, with a generous set of demo recordings made between 1970 and 1971 with the superb band that made ‘Time of the Last Persecution’ – guitarist Ray Russell, drummer Alan Rushton and bassist Daryl Runswick. All three musicians play beautifully. Russell, better known as a jazz musician with an enthusiasm for ‘freer’ musical forms makes some dramatic and searing contributions, emphasising Fay’s apocalyptic themes of cosmic battle between good and evil.
A number of these demo recordings are invaluable. There are stripped back versions of two songs from the eponymous debut album, which had been embellished with huge orchestrations from Mike Gibbs. ‘The Sun Is Bored’ has even greater menace with the focus shifted from string section to Russell’s violent bursts of guitar, whilst ‘Sing Us One of Your Songs May’ retains its eccentric charm. Then there is the bulk of ‘Time of the Last Persecution’, in prototype form, but largely faithful to the cleaner recordings that ended up on the album itself. The quality of these recordings is not good – there is plenty of residual hiss from the tape sources and the vocals frequently clip in a way that is not easy on the ear. Fay is honest about this in the sleeve notes, and I would argue that he is right that the feel and atmosphere of these sessions, as well as the quality of the songs and the musicianship, outweigh the limitations of the equipment used. It’s actually a great pleasure to hear these songs in such a raw, pure and direct form.
Perhaps even more notable amongst the demos are those songs that did not appear on either ‘Bill Fay’ or ‘Time of the Last Persecution’. There’s a wonderful ‘Love Is The Tune’, which eventually appeared on ‘Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow’ and the charming ‘Arnold is a Simple Man’ seems to be another of Fay’s brilliant character portraits of sympathetic eccentric individuals. It’s a more than worthy addition to his canon. More unexpected is the distorted sturm und drang of ‘There’s A Price Upon My Head’.
The new material is considerably harder to judge. Recorded at home using a Korg keyboard and a basic microphone, it is awash with generic synth pads, facsimile piano sounds, plinky mock pizzicato strings and very basic drum machines. These arrangements will likely present difficulties for those, like me, who love both the lavish Mike Gibbs scores and the excoriating immediacy of the band recordings. It’s quite a similar feeling to listening to those recent low budget albums Leonard Cohen made with Sharon Robinson, although ‘Still Some Light’ rather lacks their sense of irony.
‘Road of Hope’, ‘City of Dreams’, ‘Fill This World With Peace’, ‘Be at Peace with Yourself’, ‘Peace on Earth’ – the song titles certainly offered a clue as to the mood of ‘Still Some Light’. It’s a sincere and earnest collection of songs searching for the spiritual or the numinous in a troubled world. To many people, this may come across as idealistic, spiritual dreaming - to others, the sincere sense of peace, contemplation and devotion may strike a real, personal chord. It’s tempting to suggest, however, that Fay has already written a couple of definitive examples of this kind of spiritual-inspirational song with ‘Methane River’ and ‘Be Not So Fearful’. In those songs, the sentiments were mysterious and eccentric – here, they are sometimes transparently platitudinous. The nadir is probably ‘Hello Old Tree’, a mercifully brief and very whimsical track in which a tired sounding Bill takes a brief pause to commune with nature.
It’s also a challenge to adapt to Fay’s changed singing voice, which may have been diminished by his years of smoking. It’s a weaker instrument now, although much of its conversational, intimate character is retained. Whether Fay’s tepid attempts at vocal treatment – double tracking and reverb particularly – serve to improve the sound of the vocals is a matter for personal taste. I find myself frequently wishing he’d left them dry. Perhaps the biggest obstacle of all is the gentle, hushed dynamic, languid pace and consistent muted tone. Over twenty six tracks, it begins to become more oppressive than it is dreamy or peaceful. A little more rhythm would have been appreciated.
Yet, even though the production values are modest, perhaps even bizarre, there are still flashes of inspiration that remind us of Fay’s dignity, compassion and melodic invention. If we try and imagine these songs as home recorded prototypes for a studio recording that might never be, it starts to make a little more sense. Imagine the mysterious ‘City of Dreams’ with a real vibraphone and some dusty, brushed snare drum and it might sound a whole lot more evocative. There’s a humane soul in ‘There is a Valley’ and ‘Road of Hope’, in the frailty of Fay’s voice in the latter and in the expansive narrative of the former. One can’t help but wonder if the Willie who has a dream in the forest in ‘All Must Have a Dream’ is the same Willie of ‘Gentle Willie’ from the debut album. There’s a sense that the benign feeling at the heart of these songs might be a genuine inner peace and tranquillity from which a conscious rejection of conflict and intensity results.
In his sleevenotes, essentially a history of his career in the form of an embellished acknowledgements list, Fay comes across as a gentle, calm, very dignified human being. It might therefore be unfair to expect any grandstanding musical statements from him now. For all its pleading for hope and peace, ‘Still Some Light’ still seems like an insular and hermetic work. Perhaps it’s all the more interesting for that. Those who have not heard those two incredible Decca albums should certainly start there rather than here – they are wonderful recordings and, honestly, contain some of my favourite music of all time.
I should probably warn at the outset that this is likely to be a somewhat confused and disoriented piece of writing, the British singer-songwriter Bill Fay having been a musical infatuation of mine for a while now. I chanced upon the See For Miles reissue of his two albums originally made for Decca in the early 1970s in my local library some time in the early years of the last decade. I picked it up purely on the basis that I knew nothing about Fay and because the original cover images were striking. Later, when working on a piece on Fay for John Kell’s Unpredictable Same fanzine, I discovered that Fay was also being championed elsewhere. MOJO’s Jim Irvin had drawn attention to these classic, underappreciated albums, whilst Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy had been performing Fay’s ‘Be Not So Fearful’ in his solo concerts, having been introduced to the Decca albums by Jim O’Rourke.
After his Decca contract folded, Fay had not, as many imagined disappeared, but had continued to write and record music at home, away from the commercial imperatives of the music industry. Some of this was released by David Tibet on Current 93 on the excellent, spacious and mysterious ‘Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow’ set. It’s entirely probable that, much like the home tapes of the late, great Arthur Russell, there may be numerous unheard Fay recordings that are worthy of release.
‘Still Some Light’ contains the first brand new Fay recordings for over thirty years, recorded alone at home. It is packaged, delightfully, with a generous set of demo recordings made between 1970 and 1971 with the superb band that made ‘Time of the Last Persecution’ – guitarist Ray Russell, drummer Alan Rushton and bassist Daryl Runswick. All three musicians play beautifully. Russell, better known as a jazz musician with an enthusiasm for ‘freer’ musical forms makes some dramatic and searing contributions, emphasising Fay’s apocalyptic themes of cosmic battle between good and evil.
A number of these demo recordings are invaluable. There are stripped back versions of two songs from the eponymous debut album, which had been embellished with huge orchestrations from Mike Gibbs. ‘The Sun Is Bored’ has even greater menace with the focus shifted from string section to Russell’s violent bursts of guitar, whilst ‘Sing Us One of Your Songs May’ retains its eccentric charm. Then there is the bulk of ‘Time of the Last Persecution’, in prototype form, but largely faithful to the cleaner recordings that ended up on the album itself. The quality of these recordings is not good – there is plenty of residual hiss from the tape sources and the vocals frequently clip in a way that is not easy on the ear. Fay is honest about this in the sleeve notes, and I would argue that he is right that the feel and atmosphere of these sessions, as well as the quality of the songs and the musicianship, outweigh the limitations of the equipment used. It’s actually a great pleasure to hear these songs in such a raw, pure and direct form.
Perhaps even more notable amongst the demos are those songs that did not appear on either ‘Bill Fay’ or ‘Time of the Last Persecution’. There’s a wonderful ‘Love Is The Tune’, which eventually appeared on ‘Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow’ and the charming ‘Arnold is a Simple Man’ seems to be another of Fay’s brilliant character portraits of sympathetic eccentric individuals. It’s a more than worthy addition to his canon. More unexpected is the distorted sturm und drang of ‘There’s A Price Upon My Head’.
The new material is considerably harder to judge. Recorded at home using a Korg keyboard and a basic microphone, it is awash with generic synth pads, facsimile piano sounds, plinky mock pizzicato strings and very basic drum machines. These arrangements will likely present difficulties for those, like me, who love both the lavish Mike Gibbs scores and the excoriating immediacy of the band recordings. It’s quite a similar feeling to listening to those recent low budget albums Leonard Cohen made with Sharon Robinson, although ‘Still Some Light’ rather lacks their sense of irony.
‘Road of Hope’, ‘City of Dreams’, ‘Fill This World With Peace’, ‘Be at Peace with Yourself’, ‘Peace on Earth’ – the song titles certainly offered a clue as to the mood of ‘Still Some Light’. It’s a sincere and earnest collection of songs searching for the spiritual or the numinous in a troubled world. To many people, this may come across as idealistic, spiritual dreaming - to others, the sincere sense of peace, contemplation and devotion may strike a real, personal chord. It’s tempting to suggest, however, that Fay has already written a couple of definitive examples of this kind of spiritual-inspirational song with ‘Methane River’ and ‘Be Not So Fearful’. In those songs, the sentiments were mysterious and eccentric – here, they are sometimes transparently platitudinous. The nadir is probably ‘Hello Old Tree’, a mercifully brief and very whimsical track in which a tired sounding Bill takes a brief pause to commune with nature.
It’s also a challenge to adapt to Fay’s changed singing voice, which may have been diminished by his years of smoking. It’s a weaker instrument now, although much of its conversational, intimate character is retained. Whether Fay’s tepid attempts at vocal treatment – double tracking and reverb particularly – serve to improve the sound of the vocals is a matter for personal taste. I find myself frequently wishing he’d left them dry. Perhaps the biggest obstacle of all is the gentle, hushed dynamic, languid pace and consistent muted tone. Over twenty six tracks, it begins to become more oppressive than it is dreamy or peaceful. A little more rhythm would have been appreciated.
Yet, even though the production values are modest, perhaps even bizarre, there are still flashes of inspiration that remind us of Fay’s dignity, compassion and melodic invention. If we try and imagine these songs as home recorded prototypes for a studio recording that might never be, it starts to make a little more sense. Imagine the mysterious ‘City of Dreams’ with a real vibraphone and some dusty, brushed snare drum and it might sound a whole lot more evocative. There’s a humane soul in ‘There is a Valley’ and ‘Road of Hope’, in the frailty of Fay’s voice in the latter and in the expansive narrative of the former. One can’t help but wonder if the Willie who has a dream in the forest in ‘All Must Have a Dream’ is the same Willie of ‘Gentle Willie’ from the debut album. There’s a sense that the benign feeling at the heart of these songs might be a genuine inner peace and tranquillity from which a conscious rejection of conflict and intensity results.
In his sleevenotes, essentially a history of his career in the form of an embellished acknowledgements list, Fay comes across as a gentle, calm, very dignified human being. It might therefore be unfair to expect any grandstanding musical statements from him now. For all its pleading for hope and peace, ‘Still Some Light’ still seems like an insular and hermetic work. Perhaps it’s all the more interesting for that. Those who have not heard those two incredible Decca albums should certainly start there rather than here – they are wonderful recordings and, honestly, contain some of my favourite music of all time.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
An Alternative History
Iron and Wine - Around The Well (Sub Pop Compilation, 2009)
I've been quite vocal in my admiration for the songwriting of Sam Beam many times on this blog. It's testament to his talent and to my argument for him to be seen as a major artist, that this rarities collection makes for such absorbing listening. Whilst it's easy to accept 'Around The Well' as it has been presented - an 'odds and sods' compilation of B-sides, EP tracks, soundtrack contributions and covers - it actually offers a good deal more when digested as a whole. Running to two discs in length and sequenced chronologically, it provides us with an alternative history of Iron and Wine, from Beam's earliest scratchy home recordings to his creative apogee thus far in 'The Trapeze Swinger'.
The first CD is soft and delicate. Beam is the most unshowy of performers - his guitar playing light and airy, offering only the barest of accompaniment, his voice at its most whispered and understated. Listening to these songs in one sitting is a little more challenging than digesting his later, more realised material. Many of these songs feel like sketches for more ambitious writing to come. Yet the seeds of Beam's gentle command are already apparent. His melodies are often simple and repetitive (in that lingering, quietly reflective way), whilst his music is a Southern Gothic refashioning of the blues. His great success is creating a music that is steeped in the American folk tradition, whilst also developing his own unique voice.
Much of that individuality comes from his language. Whilst songwriters are frequently labeled as poets, few are compared with the great American novelists. Sam Beam has a good deal more in common with William Faulkner or Cormac McCarthy than he does with Bob Dylan. There's a combination of the sacred and the earthy that characterises the best writers ('I'll put my trust in the saviour/The fuming forces of nature') and a deep understanding that emotion can often be best expressed not through melodrama, but through direct storytelling.
His descriptions are vivid and allusive ('The money came and she died in her rocking chair/A letter locked in the pattern of her knuckles/Like a hymn to the house she was making'). As a result, his songs are imbued with a deep melancholy, sometimes even a resonant sadness, that is profoundly moving. His songs are also rich in mystery, filled with uncertain characters and insecure voices. Interpreting them is rarely a straightforward task and sometimes just basking in the flow of the words is enough ('how the rain sounds as loud as a lover's words'). On the plaintive 'Call Your Boys', which hints most clearly at the treasures to come, he seems to be dealing with the deeply personal subjects of family, ancestry and legacy, topics rarely addressed in modern songs.
His choice of covers is also assured. Even when delivering songs that do not rely on his flighty vocabulary, his style is consistent and engaging. Stereolab's 'Peng! 33' is rendered reflective rather than playful. His take on The Flaming Lips' 'Waitin' For A Superman' is so calm and unexpressive as to initially seem as if he has stripped the song of Wayne Coyne's sincerity. In fact, he has transformed it into a quiet, mournful hymn. Best of all though is his majestic version of 'Such Great Heights'. In the hands of the Postal Service, this was a chirpy, infectious piece of electronica. Beam has made it a touching folk ballad. Simply by slowing it down slightly and swinging the vocal phrasing, he radically alters the mood of the song.
The second CD begins with cleaner production values on the lovely 'Communion Cups and Someone's Coat'. By this stage, Beam's ambition to expand his reach is already apace. The dusty, charming 'Belated Promise Ring' introduces brushed drums, honky tonk piano and upright bass but this is Beam at his most traditional. 'God Made The Automobile' is deceptively lightweight (a nod to Springsteen perhaps in its cars and girls subject matter) but it's looped backing vocals seem like some sort of precursor to 'The Trapeze Swinger'. It also has one of Beam's most touching melodies.
The songs get progressively stranger and more intriguing from this point onwards. The catalyst for Beam's later hybrid sound appears to have been his massively fruitful collaboration with Calexico. It's a shame that there don't seem to have been any outtakes from 'In The Reins' held back for this set. By the time we reach 'Carried Home', his dark gothic blues is fully realised. 'Kingdom of the Animals' is more peculiar still, with the hints of dub and Afro-Caribbean rhythms that made 'The Shepherd's Dog' his most idiosyncratic and exciting album. There are some fantastic lines in this one two - its two lovers 'sweating wild and weird in our sunday clothes' - in their eyes 'an angel clear and coronal/Clothed in all that's prodigal and strange'.
He saves the very best for last here though. I've written a great deal about 'The Trapeze Swinger' in an earlier post, but it remains a song that demands close attention with every listen. The structure is simple - four chords and a very simple melody repeated over and over again for nine and a half minutes. Yet the song has a remarkable emotional force - its words so strange and involving, its sense of memory and loss so clear and compelling. The musical key to its success is the subtle variations in texture that go on beneath the vocals - how one instrument will become prominent and then settle into the background again. Yet when Beam performs it live entirely alone, it seems to work just as well. It's far too good a song to be left buried on the soundtrack of an inferior American movie - a masterpiece in fact - and it's great that it has a new and wonderful home here.
Beam's songs often need time to cast their spell. They are not easily digestible and there is a clear need to pay close attention to his words and the subtle shifts in his music. He hasn't quite made a classic album yet, but there is plenty of evidence here to suggest it is not too far away. For the time being, this collection provides plenty of insight, wisdom and imagination.
I've been quite vocal in my admiration for the songwriting of Sam Beam many times on this blog. It's testament to his talent and to my argument for him to be seen as a major artist, that this rarities collection makes for such absorbing listening. Whilst it's easy to accept 'Around The Well' as it has been presented - an 'odds and sods' compilation of B-sides, EP tracks, soundtrack contributions and covers - it actually offers a good deal more when digested as a whole. Running to two discs in length and sequenced chronologically, it provides us with an alternative history of Iron and Wine, from Beam's earliest scratchy home recordings to his creative apogee thus far in 'The Trapeze Swinger'.
The first CD is soft and delicate. Beam is the most unshowy of performers - his guitar playing light and airy, offering only the barest of accompaniment, his voice at its most whispered and understated. Listening to these songs in one sitting is a little more challenging than digesting his later, more realised material. Many of these songs feel like sketches for more ambitious writing to come. Yet the seeds of Beam's gentle command are already apparent. His melodies are often simple and repetitive (in that lingering, quietly reflective way), whilst his music is a Southern Gothic refashioning of the blues. His great success is creating a music that is steeped in the American folk tradition, whilst also developing his own unique voice.
Much of that individuality comes from his language. Whilst songwriters are frequently labeled as poets, few are compared with the great American novelists. Sam Beam has a good deal more in common with William Faulkner or Cormac McCarthy than he does with Bob Dylan. There's a combination of the sacred and the earthy that characterises the best writers ('I'll put my trust in the saviour/The fuming forces of nature') and a deep understanding that emotion can often be best expressed not through melodrama, but through direct storytelling.
His descriptions are vivid and allusive ('The money came and she died in her rocking chair/A letter locked in the pattern of her knuckles/Like a hymn to the house she was making'). As a result, his songs are imbued with a deep melancholy, sometimes even a resonant sadness, that is profoundly moving. His songs are also rich in mystery, filled with uncertain characters and insecure voices. Interpreting them is rarely a straightforward task and sometimes just basking in the flow of the words is enough ('how the rain sounds as loud as a lover's words'). On the plaintive 'Call Your Boys', which hints most clearly at the treasures to come, he seems to be dealing with the deeply personal subjects of family, ancestry and legacy, topics rarely addressed in modern songs.
His choice of covers is also assured. Even when delivering songs that do not rely on his flighty vocabulary, his style is consistent and engaging. Stereolab's 'Peng! 33' is rendered reflective rather than playful. His take on The Flaming Lips' 'Waitin' For A Superman' is so calm and unexpressive as to initially seem as if he has stripped the song of Wayne Coyne's sincerity. In fact, he has transformed it into a quiet, mournful hymn. Best of all though is his majestic version of 'Such Great Heights'. In the hands of the Postal Service, this was a chirpy, infectious piece of electronica. Beam has made it a touching folk ballad. Simply by slowing it down slightly and swinging the vocal phrasing, he radically alters the mood of the song.
The second CD begins with cleaner production values on the lovely 'Communion Cups and Someone's Coat'. By this stage, Beam's ambition to expand his reach is already apace. The dusty, charming 'Belated Promise Ring' introduces brushed drums, honky tonk piano and upright bass but this is Beam at his most traditional. 'God Made The Automobile' is deceptively lightweight (a nod to Springsteen perhaps in its cars and girls subject matter) but it's looped backing vocals seem like some sort of precursor to 'The Trapeze Swinger'. It also has one of Beam's most touching melodies.
The songs get progressively stranger and more intriguing from this point onwards. The catalyst for Beam's later hybrid sound appears to have been his massively fruitful collaboration with Calexico. It's a shame that there don't seem to have been any outtakes from 'In The Reins' held back for this set. By the time we reach 'Carried Home', his dark gothic blues is fully realised. 'Kingdom of the Animals' is more peculiar still, with the hints of dub and Afro-Caribbean rhythms that made 'The Shepherd's Dog' his most idiosyncratic and exciting album. There are some fantastic lines in this one two - its two lovers 'sweating wild and weird in our sunday clothes' - in their eyes 'an angel clear and coronal/Clothed in all that's prodigal and strange'.
He saves the very best for last here though. I've written a great deal about 'The Trapeze Swinger' in an earlier post, but it remains a song that demands close attention with every listen. The structure is simple - four chords and a very simple melody repeated over and over again for nine and a half minutes. Yet the song has a remarkable emotional force - its words so strange and involving, its sense of memory and loss so clear and compelling. The musical key to its success is the subtle variations in texture that go on beneath the vocals - how one instrument will become prominent and then settle into the background again. Yet when Beam performs it live entirely alone, it seems to work just as well. It's far too good a song to be left buried on the soundtrack of an inferior American movie - a masterpiece in fact - and it's great that it has a new and wonderful home here.
Beam's songs often need time to cast their spell. They are not easily digestible and there is a clear need to pay close attention to his words and the subtle shifts in his music. He hasn't quite made a classic album yet, but there is plenty of evidence here to suggest it is not too far away. For the time being, this collection provides plenty of insight, wisdom and imagination.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Jesus of Uncool
Nick Lowe and Ron Sexsmith - London Royal Albert Hall, 18th May 2009
Can there be a less fashionable musician currently at work than Nick Lowe? Clad in well pressed black trousers and a shirt white enough to match his hair, he hardly looks like he could be the same man who was once signed to Stiff records and who produced ‘New Rose’ for The Damned. In calling his most recent album ‘At My Age’, it’s clear that Lowe himself relishes the irony. Fashionable or not, this show offered an illuminating education in how to mature as a singer-songwriter.
Ron Sexsmith, who provided a brief but straightforwardly enjoyable opening set, might be younger, but his songs share a directness and clarity with those of Nick Lowe. The two performers complemented each other neatly and it was a shame that Sexsmith wasn’t allowed a little longer than his cursory 20 minutes. He managed to squeeze in a handful of songs from across his career, including two songs perhaps better associated with Leslie Feist (‘Brandy Alexander’ and ‘Secret Heart’). Sexsmith is not the most elaborate or diverse of writers, favouring conventional chord sequences, lyrical platitudes and hummable melodies. His songs have a calm, reflective charm though and his soft, understated voice is appealing.
It’s easy to see why Lowe’s current career retrospective is called ‘Quiet Please’. I had forgotten to bring my earplugs to the concert but I was hardly troubled by the band’s delicate dynamic. If anything, they soothed rather than exacerbated my persistent tinnitus. Such restraint enabled the band to master the Royal Albert Hall’s infamously difficult acoustic – all the parts were clearly audible, with Lowe’s voice achieving clarity in spite of his unfussy, near-spoken delivery, with its emphasis more on phrasing than power.
The set traverses Lowe’s changeable career, but favours his most recent albums, on which he has re-established himself as a wistful, occasionally whimsical writer of new country-soul standards – a hybrid of George Jones, Tony Joe White and Dan Penn. There’s not much trace of his earlier incarnations as a writer of pub-rock or affectionate parodies (the Bowie-inspired angular funk of ‘I Love The Sound of Breaking Glass’ would have sounded very odd in the middle of this set). Lowe has never been a true original or a radical, but he seems to have reached his full potential late into his career, discovering a mould into which he fits with remarkable ease.
He simply writes great songs and whether delivering them solo or accompanied by the stately and unfussy playing of his band, everything sounds effortless and unhurried. Lowe imbues his songs with subtlety and dignity. Even the casual misogyny in ‘I Trained Her To Love Me’ sounds deceptively soft (he promises that the show will be ‘entertainment for all the family’ from that point on). His songs show a rare insight and awareness into everyday home life so often absent in contemporary pop. ‘Lately I’ve Let Things Slide’ will be, for many, an all-too recognisable account of how depression sets in almost unnoticed. ‘Let’s Stay In and Make Love’ is a rather delightful tribute to the virtues of isolated intimacy over the social whirl.
The audience evidently appreciates the airing of ‘Cruel To Be Kind’, although even this is played with a lightness of touch rather than a vigorous stomp. ‘What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace, Love and Understanding’ closes the main set as a soulful ballad – a far cry from Costello’s more urgent version. Yet even with their delicacy and taste, the group can still invite toe-tapping, particularly in their rockabilly shuffles, or in the insistent backbeat of ‘When I Write the Book’.
I could have done with a bit less of special guest saxophonist Curtis Stigers, whose smooth interjections almost took some of the material into soft porn soundtrack territory. Perhaps keyboardist Geraint Watkins could have been allowed a little more space too – his occasional solos were expressive, confident flourishes. The encore begins with Lowe singing a solo take on ‘The Beast In Me’ but develops into a showpiece for the talents of his ensemble. It was a pleasant surprise to hear Watkins sound like Van Morrison when Lowe allowed him to sing one of his own songs and Ron Sexsmith joined in for a rambling take on an old Louvin Brothers song.
Lowe is an amiable on-stage presence, a storyteller and wry humourist as much as a singer. His explanation for the length of time between full UK tours (about 20 years apparently) raised a few smiles – he had been forbidden from playing in the provinces ‘due to lack of interest’. It’s a shame too that the promoters seemed to have over-stretched themselves a bit by going for the Albert Hall as London venue – the entire top circle was empty and there were many spare seats in the stalls too. Given how charming and engaging a performer Lowe clearly is, let’s hope his upcoming return to the London stage with Ry Cooder (a mouth-watering collaborative prospect) is better attended.
Can there be a less fashionable musician currently at work than Nick Lowe? Clad in well pressed black trousers and a shirt white enough to match his hair, he hardly looks like he could be the same man who was once signed to Stiff records and who produced ‘New Rose’ for The Damned. In calling his most recent album ‘At My Age’, it’s clear that Lowe himself relishes the irony. Fashionable or not, this show offered an illuminating education in how to mature as a singer-songwriter.
Ron Sexsmith, who provided a brief but straightforwardly enjoyable opening set, might be younger, but his songs share a directness and clarity with those of Nick Lowe. The two performers complemented each other neatly and it was a shame that Sexsmith wasn’t allowed a little longer than his cursory 20 minutes. He managed to squeeze in a handful of songs from across his career, including two songs perhaps better associated with Leslie Feist (‘Brandy Alexander’ and ‘Secret Heart’). Sexsmith is not the most elaborate or diverse of writers, favouring conventional chord sequences, lyrical platitudes and hummable melodies. His songs have a calm, reflective charm though and his soft, understated voice is appealing.
It’s easy to see why Lowe’s current career retrospective is called ‘Quiet Please’. I had forgotten to bring my earplugs to the concert but I was hardly troubled by the band’s delicate dynamic. If anything, they soothed rather than exacerbated my persistent tinnitus. Such restraint enabled the band to master the Royal Albert Hall’s infamously difficult acoustic – all the parts were clearly audible, with Lowe’s voice achieving clarity in spite of his unfussy, near-spoken delivery, with its emphasis more on phrasing than power.
The set traverses Lowe’s changeable career, but favours his most recent albums, on which he has re-established himself as a wistful, occasionally whimsical writer of new country-soul standards – a hybrid of George Jones, Tony Joe White and Dan Penn. There’s not much trace of his earlier incarnations as a writer of pub-rock or affectionate parodies (the Bowie-inspired angular funk of ‘I Love The Sound of Breaking Glass’ would have sounded very odd in the middle of this set). Lowe has never been a true original or a radical, but he seems to have reached his full potential late into his career, discovering a mould into which he fits with remarkable ease.
He simply writes great songs and whether delivering them solo or accompanied by the stately and unfussy playing of his band, everything sounds effortless and unhurried. Lowe imbues his songs with subtlety and dignity. Even the casual misogyny in ‘I Trained Her To Love Me’ sounds deceptively soft (he promises that the show will be ‘entertainment for all the family’ from that point on). His songs show a rare insight and awareness into everyday home life so often absent in contemporary pop. ‘Lately I’ve Let Things Slide’ will be, for many, an all-too recognisable account of how depression sets in almost unnoticed. ‘Let’s Stay In and Make Love’ is a rather delightful tribute to the virtues of isolated intimacy over the social whirl.
The audience evidently appreciates the airing of ‘Cruel To Be Kind’, although even this is played with a lightness of touch rather than a vigorous stomp. ‘What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace, Love and Understanding’ closes the main set as a soulful ballad – a far cry from Costello’s more urgent version. Yet even with their delicacy and taste, the group can still invite toe-tapping, particularly in their rockabilly shuffles, or in the insistent backbeat of ‘When I Write the Book’.
I could have done with a bit less of special guest saxophonist Curtis Stigers, whose smooth interjections almost took some of the material into soft porn soundtrack territory. Perhaps keyboardist Geraint Watkins could have been allowed a little more space too – his occasional solos were expressive, confident flourishes. The encore begins with Lowe singing a solo take on ‘The Beast In Me’ but develops into a showpiece for the talents of his ensemble. It was a pleasant surprise to hear Watkins sound like Van Morrison when Lowe allowed him to sing one of his own songs and Ron Sexsmith joined in for a rambling take on an old Louvin Brothers song.
Lowe is an amiable on-stage presence, a storyteller and wry humourist as much as a singer. His explanation for the length of time between full UK tours (about 20 years apparently) raised a few smiles – he had been forbidden from playing in the provinces ‘due to lack of interest’. It’s a shame too that the promoters seemed to have over-stretched themselves a bit by going for the Albert Hall as London venue – the entire top circle was empty and there were many spare seats in the stalls too. Given how charming and engaging a performer Lowe clearly is, let’s hope his upcoming return to the London stage with Ry Cooder (a mouth-watering collaborative prospect) is better attended.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Free Folk
Alasdair Roberts - Spoils (Drag City, 2009)
Whilst I’ve liked everything Alasdair Roberts has recorded, both as a solo artist and as Appendix Out, I had a nagging sense that his last album (‘The Amber Gatherers’) was pleasant enough, but added little to his lexicon. Pleasingly, ‘Spoils’ is a rather different beast, filled with tumultuous and inventive language, compelling narratives and free spirited musicianship. It is at once his most intricately arranged and most liberated recording and it’s more than enough to remind me that he is one of the true originals of UK folk music, twisting and turning his traditional inspirations into something radical and involving. His songs demand time and complete attention from the listener – but they certainly repay the effort invested.
With Roberts, we have a troubadour in the original sense – a singer travelling and delivering stories. Roberts avoids all the trappings of the contemporary songwriter. There are no in-depth confessionals or anthems of narcissism. Instead, he inhabits his own world of ‘simulacra’, ‘downtrodden spirits’ and much more besides. On ‘So Bored Was I (Dark Triad)’ he describes himself as ‘bilious and saturnine’. How often are those words used in modern pop? Keeping track of his vocabulary is a challenging task in itself.
It would be easy to criticise Roberts on the basis that little of this can have any real bearing on his contemporary real-life experience. Yet this would miss the point. By delving deep into the Scottish folk tradition and re-imagining it, he has brought his own heritage to dazzling, dizzying life. ‘Spoils’ may well be his best integration of tradition and composition to date and as such it feels like a living, breathing creation rather than a folkloric artefact.
It’s a record that states its intent boldly from the outset. ‘The Flyting of Grief and Joy (Eternal Return)’ is lengthy at over seven minutes but it barely feels long enough to contain all of Roberts’ ideas. Its delicate introduction puts Roberts’ faltering, vulnerable vocal firmly in the foreground, and it remains a beguiling instrument. Any sense of familiarity here is probably a result of the continued presence of Roberts’ Appendix Out colleagues Tom Crossley and Gareth Eggie. Yet the song gradually sprawls into something more unusual, with guitar lines providing counter-melodies and gently rattling percussion from the ingenious Alex Nielsen, before eventually coming full circle with a reiteration of the opening theme.
There’s more of an emphasis on rhythm here than on previous Roberts albums, perhaps as a direct result of Nielsen’s presence. The loose rattle and roll of ‘You Muses Assist’ feels particularly invigorating. The languid opening to ‘Ned Ludd’s Rant’ proves deceptive, the mournful feel giving way to a gentle gallop. Even when the pace is slower and controlled, Nielsen gets a fascinating range of sound from his instruments, contributing as much to the timbre and texture of the songs as to the rhythm.
The result is a sound with recognisable echoes – the guitar language of Richard Thompson particularly – but which also sounds refreshingly peculiar and hypnotic. ‘Hazel Forks’ might be the most conventional thing here, but even this song hardly confines to the structural restrictions of modern pop songcraft. It has the misfortune to share a key lyric with Billy Joel’s ‘Goodnight Saigon’ (we’ll all go down together’) but it’s far from overblown. Its unexpected sidesteps and detours make it more intriguing than confounding.
The album concludes with ‘Under No Enchantment (But My Own)’, one of the prettiest songs Roberts has written, its many melodies combining to produce something thoroughly delightful. It’s a charming end to a restlessly strange, brilliantly performed set of songs. Whilst Roberts has clearly immersed himself in the history of the folk ballad to a degree that the youthful West London folk scene could hardly imagine, he’s also blessed with a unique and enchanting voice and sound that is entirely his own.
Whilst I’ve liked everything Alasdair Roberts has recorded, both as a solo artist and as Appendix Out, I had a nagging sense that his last album (‘The Amber Gatherers’) was pleasant enough, but added little to his lexicon. Pleasingly, ‘Spoils’ is a rather different beast, filled with tumultuous and inventive language, compelling narratives and free spirited musicianship. It is at once his most intricately arranged and most liberated recording and it’s more than enough to remind me that he is one of the true originals of UK folk music, twisting and turning his traditional inspirations into something radical and involving. His songs demand time and complete attention from the listener – but they certainly repay the effort invested.
With Roberts, we have a troubadour in the original sense – a singer travelling and delivering stories. Roberts avoids all the trappings of the contemporary songwriter. There are no in-depth confessionals or anthems of narcissism. Instead, he inhabits his own world of ‘simulacra’, ‘downtrodden spirits’ and much more besides. On ‘So Bored Was I (Dark Triad)’ he describes himself as ‘bilious and saturnine’. How often are those words used in modern pop? Keeping track of his vocabulary is a challenging task in itself.
It would be easy to criticise Roberts on the basis that little of this can have any real bearing on his contemporary real-life experience. Yet this would miss the point. By delving deep into the Scottish folk tradition and re-imagining it, he has brought his own heritage to dazzling, dizzying life. ‘Spoils’ may well be his best integration of tradition and composition to date and as such it feels like a living, breathing creation rather than a folkloric artefact.
It’s a record that states its intent boldly from the outset. ‘The Flyting of Grief and Joy (Eternal Return)’ is lengthy at over seven minutes but it barely feels long enough to contain all of Roberts’ ideas. Its delicate introduction puts Roberts’ faltering, vulnerable vocal firmly in the foreground, and it remains a beguiling instrument. Any sense of familiarity here is probably a result of the continued presence of Roberts’ Appendix Out colleagues Tom Crossley and Gareth Eggie. Yet the song gradually sprawls into something more unusual, with guitar lines providing counter-melodies and gently rattling percussion from the ingenious Alex Nielsen, before eventually coming full circle with a reiteration of the opening theme.
There’s more of an emphasis on rhythm here than on previous Roberts albums, perhaps as a direct result of Nielsen’s presence. The loose rattle and roll of ‘You Muses Assist’ feels particularly invigorating. The languid opening to ‘Ned Ludd’s Rant’ proves deceptive, the mournful feel giving way to a gentle gallop. Even when the pace is slower and controlled, Nielsen gets a fascinating range of sound from his instruments, contributing as much to the timbre and texture of the songs as to the rhythm.
The result is a sound with recognisable echoes – the guitar language of Richard Thompson particularly – but which also sounds refreshingly peculiar and hypnotic. ‘Hazel Forks’ might be the most conventional thing here, but even this song hardly confines to the structural restrictions of modern pop songcraft. It has the misfortune to share a key lyric with Billy Joel’s ‘Goodnight Saigon’ (we’ll all go down together’) but it’s far from overblown. Its unexpected sidesteps and detours make it more intriguing than confounding.
The album concludes with ‘Under No Enchantment (But My Own)’, one of the prettiest songs Roberts has written, its many melodies combining to produce something thoroughly delightful. It’s a charming end to a restlessly strange, brilliantly performed set of songs. Whilst Roberts has clearly immersed himself in the history of the folk ballad to a degree that the youthful West London folk scene could hardly imagine, he’s also blessed with a unique and enchanting voice and sound that is entirely his own.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Bird of Prey
Bill Callahan - Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle (Drag City, 2009)
From Smog to his own name via a set of confounding parentheses, the moniker may have changed, but Bill Callahan’s musical and lyrical oeuvre has remained resolute. Perhaps ‘Woke On A Whaleheart’ presented Callahan at his least mordant and most breezy, but his light, conversational vocal style handles either mood with a similar dispassionate gaze. Even when he’s at his warmest, there’s a chilly hint of irony waiting to break through. He puts it rather starkly himself on ‘Jim Cain’, the opening song here when he sings ‘I used to be darker, then I got lighter, then I got dark again’.
‘Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle’ makes listening (and by extension judging) a little easier by virtue of placing Callahan’s voice in some surprisingly novel contexts. The main reason for this lies in the orchestrations of Brian Beattie, which somehow manage to incorporate strings and horns without sounding at all extravagant or excessive. It makes for a lusher, more involving sound but one that somehow manages to retain the confrontational minimalism of Callahan’s boldest writing. Every instrument, even the drum kit, seems to be played with a refreshing lightness of touch. Callahan himself has mentioned Jimmy Webb, and a less schmaltzy Burt Bacharach might also be a valid reference point. There’s something in Callahan’s light, slippery vocal style that in this context reminds me most clearly of the wonderful first Bill Fay album.
Grammatical quandary of its title notwithstanding, this might be one of Callahan’s most direct and appealing records to date. Often caricatured as a miserabilist or a misanthrope, Callahan often seems to be a little more complex and enigmatic than such stereotyping implies. This new album is for the most part calm, peaceful and contemplative, sometimes disarmingly so. It presents an intriguing side-step after the occasional forthright joviality of ‘..Whaleheart’. If there’s a bridging song between the two album, it might be the lovely ‘Sycamore’, where Callahan’s deep vocal sounded ponderous and calm, floating above a serene musical backdrop.
Its closest relation here is ‘The Wind and The Dove’, a beautiful melody which Callahan characteristically leaves understated.
The album is full of subtleties that expand Callahan’s musical vocabulary quite considerably. One of the best songs is ‘Eid Ma Clackshaw’ (no doubt there’s an explanation for the title somewhere), which pits slightly swung vocal phrasing from Callahan against an insistent crotchet rhythm. It sounds peculiarly rigid, in an interesting way. ‘Too Many Birds’ is both simpler and prettier – one of the most beautiful moments on a lush, affecting album – but it also draws a lot of its impact from Callahan’s attempt to protract certain lines whilst squeezing in others. Those that admire the more austere Callahan should be satiated with the defiantly skeletal ‘Rococo Zephyr’ although even this seems less agitated and more assured than past efforts.
Callahan continues his bestial preoccupations here, with plenty of reference to both birds and beasts. On ‘Eid Ma Clackshaw’ love is the beast with a hunger that cannot be tamed. Even his song titles further this line of thought, with ‘All Thoughts Are Prey To Some Beast’ teetering on the brink of self parody. Musically, it’s excellent, with its early eerie calm gradually giving way to intensifying menace. For all the lushness in the arrangements, there’s still a lingering nastiness throughout the album, with motorik rhythms contrasting with Callahan’s delivery.
This unusual hybrid of calm and storm, peace and violence is every bit as complicated and confusing as life experience can so often be. In its apparent paradoxes, it emerges as one of Callahan’s most confident and assured albums. Here, he’s both as graceful and as predatory as the eagle he desires to be.
From Smog to his own name via a set of confounding parentheses, the moniker may have changed, but Bill Callahan’s musical and lyrical oeuvre has remained resolute. Perhaps ‘Woke On A Whaleheart’ presented Callahan at his least mordant and most breezy, but his light, conversational vocal style handles either mood with a similar dispassionate gaze. Even when he’s at his warmest, there’s a chilly hint of irony waiting to break through. He puts it rather starkly himself on ‘Jim Cain’, the opening song here when he sings ‘I used to be darker, then I got lighter, then I got dark again’.
‘Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle’ makes listening (and by extension judging) a little easier by virtue of placing Callahan’s voice in some surprisingly novel contexts. The main reason for this lies in the orchestrations of Brian Beattie, which somehow manage to incorporate strings and horns without sounding at all extravagant or excessive. It makes for a lusher, more involving sound but one that somehow manages to retain the confrontational minimalism of Callahan’s boldest writing. Every instrument, even the drum kit, seems to be played with a refreshing lightness of touch. Callahan himself has mentioned Jimmy Webb, and a less schmaltzy Burt Bacharach might also be a valid reference point. There’s something in Callahan’s light, slippery vocal style that in this context reminds me most clearly of the wonderful first Bill Fay album.
Grammatical quandary of its title notwithstanding, this might be one of Callahan’s most direct and appealing records to date. Often caricatured as a miserabilist or a misanthrope, Callahan often seems to be a little more complex and enigmatic than such stereotyping implies. This new album is for the most part calm, peaceful and contemplative, sometimes disarmingly so. It presents an intriguing side-step after the occasional forthright joviality of ‘..Whaleheart’. If there’s a bridging song between the two album, it might be the lovely ‘Sycamore’, where Callahan’s deep vocal sounded ponderous and calm, floating above a serene musical backdrop.
Its closest relation here is ‘The Wind and The Dove’, a beautiful melody which Callahan characteristically leaves understated.
The album is full of subtleties that expand Callahan’s musical vocabulary quite considerably. One of the best songs is ‘Eid Ma Clackshaw’ (no doubt there’s an explanation for the title somewhere), which pits slightly swung vocal phrasing from Callahan against an insistent crotchet rhythm. It sounds peculiarly rigid, in an interesting way. ‘Too Many Birds’ is both simpler and prettier – one of the most beautiful moments on a lush, affecting album – but it also draws a lot of its impact from Callahan’s attempt to protract certain lines whilst squeezing in others. Those that admire the more austere Callahan should be satiated with the defiantly skeletal ‘Rococo Zephyr’ although even this seems less agitated and more assured than past efforts.
Callahan continues his bestial preoccupations here, with plenty of reference to both birds and beasts. On ‘Eid Ma Clackshaw’ love is the beast with a hunger that cannot be tamed. Even his song titles further this line of thought, with ‘All Thoughts Are Prey To Some Beast’ teetering on the brink of self parody. Musically, it’s excellent, with its early eerie calm gradually giving way to intensifying menace. For all the lushness in the arrangements, there’s still a lingering nastiness throughout the album, with motorik rhythms contrasting with Callahan’s delivery.
This unusual hybrid of calm and storm, peace and violence is every bit as complicated and confusing as life experience can so often be. In its apparent paradoxes, it emerges as one of Callahan’s most confident and assured albums. Here, he’s both as graceful and as predatory as the eagle he desires to be.
A Mild Case of the Blues
Bob Dylan - Together Through Life (Columbia, 2009)
Unusually, I find myself almost agreeing with Petridish in The Guardian. His observation last week that the hype surrounding every new Bob Dylan release makes them impossible to judge seemed entirely reasonable. A handful of the reviews of ‘Together Through Life’ I’ve read so far have been quite measured, but many have been very generous. Allan Jones’ review in Uncut magazine, yet again proffering the five star treatment, seems absurdly uncritical. How do we judge an album arriving in the twilight years of a singular, remarkable career that has lasted over forty years?
If we’re unfair enough to insist that a new Dylan work is judged within the context of his complete output, then ‘Together Through Life’ can only be seen as his least ambitious and least interesting work since ‘Under The Red Sky’. The collections of acoustic reinterpretations ‘Good As I Been To You’ and ‘World Gone Wrong’ both had more to offer and can now be seen as transitional albums, directing Dylan back to his core concerns within the American folk tradition. These concerns reappeared on ‘Time Out of Mind’ and dominated ‘Love and Theft’ and ‘Modern Times’. There’s nothing on ‘Together Through Life’ as powerful as ‘Tryin’ To Get To Heaven’, ‘Not Dark Yet’, ‘Mississippi’ or ‘Workingman’s Blues #2’ and certainly nothing as sustained as ‘Highlands’ or as funny as many of the blues numbers on ‘Love and Theft’.
The PR story surrounding this album suggested that it took even Columbia records by surprise, with Dylan continuing to write and record after being commissioned to produce a song for Olivier Dahan’s new film. The reality seems a little less clear, with the late emergence of the news that all but one of the lyrics were co-written with former Grateful Dead poet Robert Hunter. This set alarm bells ringing in the minds of even the most slavish Dylan devotees. Dylan and Hunter collaborated once before, at the absolute nadir of Dylan’s career on ‘Down In The Groove’. The two songs that resulted were far from inspired. ‘Silvio’ might have been one of the best tracks on that album, but that simply wasn’t good enough from an artist of Dylan’s proven calibre. The less said about ‘Ugliest Girl in the World’ the better. Not even irony or childish humour could defend it.
There’s nothing here quite that bad mercifully, but the lyrics are notably simpler, sometimes more banal. I’m not one of those people that unreasonably expects Dylan to always write in florid surrealist allusions. Sometimes his best lyrics have been his most direct. However, even those direct, personal lyrics have been sustained and bold (I’m thinking particularly of ‘Up To Me’, a song rarely recognised as one of his very best). For all the literary criticism and analysis of his borrowings, Dylan’s ultimate achievement has been the complete integration of words and music within the form of longer, ambitious pop songs. He has also played the most significant role in the development of expressive vocal phrasing in the post-war era. But ‘Together Through Life’ seems like one of those occasional Dylan albums where he’s desperate to escape that burdensome legacy. These more straightforward words, whilst occasionally intriguing, offer too little for Dylan to sink his teeth into in terms of his delivery. Where he usually sounds ferocious or brutal, he frequently sounds lazy or non-committal here, on songs that at least pretend to be about love.
This works well on two songs. ‘Life is Hard’ is a delicate croon in the model of ‘Spirit on the Water’ or ‘Beyond The Horizon’, better than the latter but nowhere near as striking as the former. It is languid, laconic and hazy in a manner we’re still not entirely used to from Dylan. Where ‘Bye and Bye’ was light and breezy, this is exaggerated and mannered. It contrasts starkly with his tendency to rush and force his phrasing in live performance. On ‘This Dream Of You’ he sounds so hushed he’s almost in the background, and the song’s border feel lends it a hypnotic quality appropriate for its theme. This is territory that Dylan has visited before (‘Dreamin’ Of You’, an outtake from ‘Time Out Of Mind’ that surfaced last year on ‘Tell Tale Signs’) but this is a worthwhile addition to such world-weary concerns. Its melancholy tone and modified Latin rhythm remind me of Roy Orbison, although he would have course have delivered it with that incomparable combination of grandeur and quivering vulnerability.
The album is liberally peppered with the accordion of David Hidalgo, which seems to occupy the role Dylan’s unconventional keyboard playing assumes in concert – responding and serving as a counterpoint to his vocal delivery. It’s a neat idea, but I’m not quite convinced that the band have got enough mileage from it. As with most of Dylan’s output, there’s little to no dynamic or textural variation on these songs. This is unproblematic whenever Dylan’s delivery is urgent and when he has plenty to say but the generic blues tracks here are often uncharacteristically lacking in bite. For my money, Allan Jones’ comparison of this supposedly ‘rambunctious’ record with The Basement Tapes is massively wide of the mark. Even ‘My Wife’s Home Town’ and ‘Jolene’, on which Dylan’s growl is more savage and commanding, seem a little tame and polite musically. Drummer George Recile, one of the more exciting musicians in Dylan’s touring band, is kept on something of a tight leash here, where a greater contribution would have created more tension and drama. When the music here is at its most atmospheric, such as on ‘Forgetful Heart’, it’s inevitably accompanied by an inconsequential lyric.
There are songs here I really want to like more than I do. ‘Shake Shake Mama’ is a lightweight but endearing blues shuffle groove, but definitely the lesser cousin of something like ‘Summer Days’ or ‘Someday Baby’. It’s enjoyable chiefly for its sly humour. Many will latch on to the closer ‘It’s All Good’ with its litany of intensifying problems, all shrugged off with the title’s recurring platitude (‘buildings are crumbling in the neighbourhood but there’s nothing to worry about, ‘cos it’s all good!’). Dylan allows himself a little laugh mid-way through the song which encapsulates its mischievous spirit. I’m not sure it actually does all that much to expand his lexicon though, and there is an increasing problem with his reliance on non-sequiturs – ‘big politicians tellin’ lies/Restaurant kitchen all full of flies’ is, I’m afraid, not a good couplet at all. Like much of the music on this album, it makes me tap my foot reservedly, but doesn’t quite make me feel like dancing.
Dylan comes closest to capturing the border magic he’s clearly striving for on ‘If You Ever Go To Houston’, but it’s again slightly too measured and controlled. It has one of the album’s best lyrics, revitalising some of the caricatures and stereotypes of American narrative songwriting. Here, there are bar-rooms and gun-belts galore. It somehow feels both historic and ageless all at the same time. I suspect this and the entertaining ‘Jolene’ will be the growers of this set.
He almost escapes the shackles of the blues form on the portentously titled ‘I Feel A Change Comin’ On’, instead revisiting the dusty, soulful feel of ‘Tryin’ To Get To Heaven’ or ‘Workingman’s Blues’. I’m not too concerned abut some of the lyrics seem rather self-consciously imposing. It’s likely that this line: ‘I’m listening to Billy Joe Shaver and reading James Joyce/Some people they tell me, I’ve got the blood of the land in my voice’ will be the most often quoted from this album. But do those influences lead directly to the gravitas of what follows? I’m actually more taken with the bizarre opening couplet (‘I’ve been walking the world over, looking far off to the east/Well I see my baby comin’, she’s-a-walking with the village Priest’). Dylan risks descending into cliché with such ‘rambling man’ language, but his lifestyle as a constantly touring performer imbues it with real world poignancy. His band’s playing is at its most relaxed and musical on this song, and it’s comfortably the most amiable song here, lingering favourably in the mind.
I have no real objection to Dylan, contrary to the film’s title, actually looking back and reviving older pre-rock n’roll musical styles. At the age of 68, it’s probably unreasonable to expect anything as revolutionary as ‘that wild mercury sound’ again. As I’ve remarked before, the blues context particularly suits his ravaged voice and therefore seems as much driven by practical as by artistic concerns. He genuinely sounds like a voice of experience now, which is why it seems slightly disappointing that much of ‘Together Through Life’ sees him lost in a romantic reverie rather than offering much in the way of real psychological insight. Conservative though they were in the main, ‘Love and Theft’ and ‘Modern Times’ both worked because of the sheer exuberance and zest of Dylan’s wordplay and wit. These are only fleetingly in evidence on ‘Together Through Life’.
As an enjoyable listen, ‘Together Through Life’ is by no means disastrous. But we are doing both Dylan and his devoted followers a disservice if we try and claim that it is ‘yet another masterpiece’. It’s one of his more feathery and vague records. It’s not without charm but there are certainly times when it feels like it should be a little more muscular. It’s also hard to approach it without remembering that Dylan said much more about relationships on ‘Blood on the Tracks’ and ‘Desire’. For those simply happy to hear more from a man who is clearly incapable of stopping, it will be good enough. For his harshest critics or some of his more demanding devotees, it will come as something of a letdown.
Unusually, I find myself almost agreeing with Petridish in The Guardian. His observation last week that the hype surrounding every new Bob Dylan release makes them impossible to judge seemed entirely reasonable. A handful of the reviews of ‘Together Through Life’ I’ve read so far have been quite measured, but many have been very generous. Allan Jones’ review in Uncut magazine, yet again proffering the five star treatment, seems absurdly uncritical. How do we judge an album arriving in the twilight years of a singular, remarkable career that has lasted over forty years?
If we’re unfair enough to insist that a new Dylan work is judged within the context of his complete output, then ‘Together Through Life’ can only be seen as his least ambitious and least interesting work since ‘Under The Red Sky’. The collections of acoustic reinterpretations ‘Good As I Been To You’ and ‘World Gone Wrong’ both had more to offer and can now be seen as transitional albums, directing Dylan back to his core concerns within the American folk tradition. These concerns reappeared on ‘Time Out of Mind’ and dominated ‘Love and Theft’ and ‘Modern Times’. There’s nothing on ‘Together Through Life’ as powerful as ‘Tryin’ To Get To Heaven’, ‘Not Dark Yet’, ‘Mississippi’ or ‘Workingman’s Blues #2’ and certainly nothing as sustained as ‘Highlands’ or as funny as many of the blues numbers on ‘Love and Theft’.
The PR story surrounding this album suggested that it took even Columbia records by surprise, with Dylan continuing to write and record after being commissioned to produce a song for Olivier Dahan’s new film. The reality seems a little less clear, with the late emergence of the news that all but one of the lyrics were co-written with former Grateful Dead poet Robert Hunter. This set alarm bells ringing in the minds of even the most slavish Dylan devotees. Dylan and Hunter collaborated once before, at the absolute nadir of Dylan’s career on ‘Down In The Groove’. The two songs that resulted were far from inspired. ‘Silvio’ might have been one of the best tracks on that album, but that simply wasn’t good enough from an artist of Dylan’s proven calibre. The less said about ‘Ugliest Girl in the World’ the better. Not even irony or childish humour could defend it.
There’s nothing here quite that bad mercifully, but the lyrics are notably simpler, sometimes more banal. I’m not one of those people that unreasonably expects Dylan to always write in florid surrealist allusions. Sometimes his best lyrics have been his most direct. However, even those direct, personal lyrics have been sustained and bold (I’m thinking particularly of ‘Up To Me’, a song rarely recognised as one of his very best). For all the literary criticism and analysis of his borrowings, Dylan’s ultimate achievement has been the complete integration of words and music within the form of longer, ambitious pop songs. He has also played the most significant role in the development of expressive vocal phrasing in the post-war era. But ‘Together Through Life’ seems like one of those occasional Dylan albums where he’s desperate to escape that burdensome legacy. These more straightforward words, whilst occasionally intriguing, offer too little for Dylan to sink his teeth into in terms of his delivery. Where he usually sounds ferocious or brutal, he frequently sounds lazy or non-committal here, on songs that at least pretend to be about love.
This works well on two songs. ‘Life is Hard’ is a delicate croon in the model of ‘Spirit on the Water’ or ‘Beyond The Horizon’, better than the latter but nowhere near as striking as the former. It is languid, laconic and hazy in a manner we’re still not entirely used to from Dylan. Where ‘Bye and Bye’ was light and breezy, this is exaggerated and mannered. It contrasts starkly with his tendency to rush and force his phrasing in live performance. On ‘This Dream Of You’ he sounds so hushed he’s almost in the background, and the song’s border feel lends it a hypnotic quality appropriate for its theme. This is territory that Dylan has visited before (‘Dreamin’ Of You’, an outtake from ‘Time Out Of Mind’ that surfaced last year on ‘Tell Tale Signs’) but this is a worthwhile addition to such world-weary concerns. Its melancholy tone and modified Latin rhythm remind me of Roy Orbison, although he would have course have delivered it with that incomparable combination of grandeur and quivering vulnerability.
The album is liberally peppered with the accordion of David Hidalgo, which seems to occupy the role Dylan’s unconventional keyboard playing assumes in concert – responding and serving as a counterpoint to his vocal delivery. It’s a neat idea, but I’m not quite convinced that the band have got enough mileage from it. As with most of Dylan’s output, there’s little to no dynamic or textural variation on these songs. This is unproblematic whenever Dylan’s delivery is urgent and when he has plenty to say but the generic blues tracks here are often uncharacteristically lacking in bite. For my money, Allan Jones’ comparison of this supposedly ‘rambunctious’ record with The Basement Tapes is massively wide of the mark. Even ‘My Wife’s Home Town’ and ‘Jolene’, on which Dylan’s growl is more savage and commanding, seem a little tame and polite musically. Drummer George Recile, one of the more exciting musicians in Dylan’s touring band, is kept on something of a tight leash here, where a greater contribution would have created more tension and drama. When the music here is at its most atmospheric, such as on ‘Forgetful Heart’, it’s inevitably accompanied by an inconsequential lyric.
There are songs here I really want to like more than I do. ‘Shake Shake Mama’ is a lightweight but endearing blues shuffle groove, but definitely the lesser cousin of something like ‘Summer Days’ or ‘Someday Baby’. It’s enjoyable chiefly for its sly humour. Many will latch on to the closer ‘It’s All Good’ with its litany of intensifying problems, all shrugged off with the title’s recurring platitude (‘buildings are crumbling in the neighbourhood but there’s nothing to worry about, ‘cos it’s all good!’). Dylan allows himself a little laugh mid-way through the song which encapsulates its mischievous spirit. I’m not sure it actually does all that much to expand his lexicon though, and there is an increasing problem with his reliance on non-sequiturs – ‘big politicians tellin’ lies/Restaurant kitchen all full of flies’ is, I’m afraid, not a good couplet at all. Like much of the music on this album, it makes me tap my foot reservedly, but doesn’t quite make me feel like dancing.
Dylan comes closest to capturing the border magic he’s clearly striving for on ‘If You Ever Go To Houston’, but it’s again slightly too measured and controlled. It has one of the album’s best lyrics, revitalising some of the caricatures and stereotypes of American narrative songwriting. Here, there are bar-rooms and gun-belts galore. It somehow feels both historic and ageless all at the same time. I suspect this and the entertaining ‘Jolene’ will be the growers of this set.
He almost escapes the shackles of the blues form on the portentously titled ‘I Feel A Change Comin’ On’, instead revisiting the dusty, soulful feel of ‘Tryin’ To Get To Heaven’ or ‘Workingman’s Blues’. I’m not too concerned abut some of the lyrics seem rather self-consciously imposing. It’s likely that this line: ‘I’m listening to Billy Joe Shaver and reading James Joyce/Some people they tell me, I’ve got the blood of the land in my voice’ will be the most often quoted from this album. But do those influences lead directly to the gravitas of what follows? I’m actually more taken with the bizarre opening couplet (‘I’ve been walking the world over, looking far off to the east/Well I see my baby comin’, she’s-a-walking with the village Priest’). Dylan risks descending into cliché with such ‘rambling man’ language, but his lifestyle as a constantly touring performer imbues it with real world poignancy. His band’s playing is at its most relaxed and musical on this song, and it’s comfortably the most amiable song here, lingering favourably in the mind.
I have no real objection to Dylan, contrary to the film’s title, actually looking back and reviving older pre-rock n’roll musical styles. At the age of 68, it’s probably unreasonable to expect anything as revolutionary as ‘that wild mercury sound’ again. As I’ve remarked before, the blues context particularly suits his ravaged voice and therefore seems as much driven by practical as by artistic concerns. He genuinely sounds like a voice of experience now, which is why it seems slightly disappointing that much of ‘Together Through Life’ sees him lost in a romantic reverie rather than offering much in the way of real psychological insight. Conservative though they were in the main, ‘Love and Theft’ and ‘Modern Times’ both worked because of the sheer exuberance and zest of Dylan’s wordplay and wit. These are only fleetingly in evidence on ‘Together Through Life’.
As an enjoyable listen, ‘Together Through Life’ is by no means disastrous. But we are doing both Dylan and his devoted followers a disservice if we try and claim that it is ‘yet another masterpiece’. It’s one of his more feathery and vague records. It’s not without charm but there are certainly times when it feels like it should be a little more muscular. It’s also hard to approach it without remembering that Dylan said much more about relationships on ‘Blood on the Tracks’ and ‘Desire’. For those simply happy to hear more from a man who is clearly incapable of stopping, it will be good enough. For his harshest critics or some of his more demanding devotees, it will come as something of a letdown.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
A Contrarian Unmasked
Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - Beware (Domino, 2009)
The cover is deep black, with a remarkably striking portrait of the artist in white silhouette. The typography hints at Neil Young’s iconic ‘Tonight’s The Night’ sleeve. Then there are the song titles – ‘Death Final’, ‘You Are Lost’, ‘I Am Goodbye’. At first glance, ‘Beware’ looks like a more natural successor to the classic ‘I See A Darkness’ than anything Will Oldham has recorded in the intervening years.
This being the work of a prolific man with many guises, who enjoys confusing and confounding his admirers as much as his detractors, it predictably isn’t quite that simple. ‘Beware’ is another step on Oldham’s strange, questioning journey, and another refusal simply to repeat former glories. What is for sure, at least to these ears, is that this is his best, most confident work since the aforementioned first outing under the BPB name.
On his most recent albums, Oldham has been experimenting with the effects of working with different vocalists. In fact, it’s been surprising how well his characteristically wayward voice has blended with his female collaborators. On ‘Beware’ he has assembled something approaching a mass choir. Sometimes they provide swelling background harmonies, whilst at others they work (very effectively) in response to his calls. The result is what might be Oldham’s most expansive and extravagant album to date – a form of imposing Nashville soul that is both commanding and compelling.
If anything, ‘Beware’ is closest in sound to ‘Greatest Palace Music’, the album on which Oldham controversially covered himself in Nashville syrup. I’m not sure that ‘Beware’ is destined to follow that album’s unfair dismissal though. The songs here are simply too good to be ignored. Also, the notion that this represents some new ‘positive’ or ‘happy’ Oldham is far too schematic an interpretation. Whilst ‘Beware’ is certainly full of physical humour and even occasionally some warmth, its overall emotional landscape is a good deal more slippery and complex.
So, whilst ‘I Don’t Belong To Anyone’ examines the joys of fun-loving bachelor status (a far more enjoyable song than Morrissey’s surly ‘I’m OK By Myself’) and ‘You Don’t Love Me’ explores the virtues of non-committal lovemaking, there’s also the devastatingly poignant ‘Heart’s Arms’ and the mysterious, troubling ‘You Are Lost’. The former is as expressive and eloquent a break-up song as I’ve heard (‘I open this awful machine to nothing, where once your intimacies came pounding’) and the latter seems to recognise the need for a free spirited partner to escape the restrictions imposed by its protagonist (‘if you listen to me you are lost’).
What emerges clearly from this selection of songs is the tremendous human insight of Oldham’s writing. One of Oldham’s older songs ‘One With The Birds’, introduced the tricky concept of being ‘inhuman’ and perhaps not being as distant from animals as we might wish. ‘Beware’ seems to incorporate some of our less altruistic desires into a more intricate and complete portrait of being human. Sometimes this lies in directly confronting the more unpalatable sides of human nature, from selfishness and greed to controlling impulses. Sometimes it’s a recognition of the warmth that can be found in tiny physical details (the ‘belly laughs’ or ‘the way my stomach jiggles’). At other times, it’s even rueful or self deprecating (‘you say my kisses don’t even raise a six on a scale of one to ten’). It’s a richly nuanced depiction of human life that refuses to conform to anything as simplistic as a positive or negative viewpoint.
Elsewhere, he mischievously undercuts the tropes of the American blues tradition (‘I know everyone knows the trouble I have seen/That’s the thing about trouble you can love’) and seems preoccupied with the concept of work, particularly in relationships. At the moment, ‘My Life’s Work’ is striking me as one of his most powerful and strident songs to date.
Musically, the album is as confident and audacious a work as any in Oldham’s illustrious canon. The first interjection of the choir on ‘Beware Your Only Friend’ immediately betrays the album’s wry humour (‘I want to be your only friend’, sings Oldham, ‘does that sound scary?’ responds the choir). Throughout the album, backing vocals conspire to add depth and power. The instrumentation is also correspondingly lavish, with plenty of fiddles, flutes, cornets and even the odd saxophone solo. On ‘Heart’s Arms’, Oldham explores the dramatic potential of sudden dynamic contrasts.
Yet ‘Beware’ is also an embrace of country music’s subtleties as well as its potential for luxury. There’s the gentle shuffle of ‘I Don’t Belong To Anyone’ or the more reflective, delicate lilt of ‘Death Final’, both excellent songs. Often the rhythmic foundation comes more from hand percussion than a full drum kit, a neat trick that lends space to the music where it might otherwise have been cluttered. This works particularly well on the extraordinary, dream-like closing track ‘Afraid Ain’t Me’.
There’s also a melodic familiarity to some of the tracks here that somehow manages to be more of a strength than a weakness. Oldham has certainly done this before – with ‘One With The Birds’ having borrowed heavily from Gram Parsons’ ‘Hickory Wind’. Here, ‘Beware Your Only Friend’ reminds me slightly of ‘Octopus’ Garden’, although it’s admittedly hard to imagine Ringo Starr singing these words. More notably perhaps, ‘Without Work, You Have Nothing’ strongly resembles the old Jerome Kern standard ‘The Way You Look Tonight’. These borrowings make the songs sound rooted in history, but Oldham takes these melodies to a wildly different place.
Oldham has never made a bad album as such, but sometimes they’ve seemed either overly conceptual (‘Sings Greatest Palace Music’) or have hidden some depths within considerable subtleties (‘The Letting Go’). ‘Beware’ is an immediate and authoritative statement, but one that seems likely to have a durable quality too. Straightforwardly, for such a contrarian, these are outstanding songs, delivered with a distinctive authorial voice.
The cover is deep black, with a remarkably striking portrait of the artist in white silhouette. The typography hints at Neil Young’s iconic ‘Tonight’s The Night’ sleeve. Then there are the song titles – ‘Death Final’, ‘You Are Lost’, ‘I Am Goodbye’. At first glance, ‘Beware’ looks like a more natural successor to the classic ‘I See A Darkness’ than anything Will Oldham has recorded in the intervening years.
This being the work of a prolific man with many guises, who enjoys confusing and confounding his admirers as much as his detractors, it predictably isn’t quite that simple. ‘Beware’ is another step on Oldham’s strange, questioning journey, and another refusal simply to repeat former glories. What is for sure, at least to these ears, is that this is his best, most confident work since the aforementioned first outing under the BPB name.
On his most recent albums, Oldham has been experimenting with the effects of working with different vocalists. In fact, it’s been surprising how well his characteristically wayward voice has blended with his female collaborators. On ‘Beware’ he has assembled something approaching a mass choir. Sometimes they provide swelling background harmonies, whilst at others they work (very effectively) in response to his calls. The result is what might be Oldham’s most expansive and extravagant album to date – a form of imposing Nashville soul that is both commanding and compelling.
If anything, ‘Beware’ is closest in sound to ‘Greatest Palace Music’, the album on which Oldham controversially covered himself in Nashville syrup. I’m not sure that ‘Beware’ is destined to follow that album’s unfair dismissal though. The songs here are simply too good to be ignored. Also, the notion that this represents some new ‘positive’ or ‘happy’ Oldham is far too schematic an interpretation. Whilst ‘Beware’ is certainly full of physical humour and even occasionally some warmth, its overall emotional landscape is a good deal more slippery and complex.
So, whilst ‘I Don’t Belong To Anyone’ examines the joys of fun-loving bachelor status (a far more enjoyable song than Morrissey’s surly ‘I’m OK By Myself’) and ‘You Don’t Love Me’ explores the virtues of non-committal lovemaking, there’s also the devastatingly poignant ‘Heart’s Arms’ and the mysterious, troubling ‘You Are Lost’. The former is as expressive and eloquent a break-up song as I’ve heard (‘I open this awful machine to nothing, where once your intimacies came pounding’) and the latter seems to recognise the need for a free spirited partner to escape the restrictions imposed by its protagonist (‘if you listen to me you are lost’).
What emerges clearly from this selection of songs is the tremendous human insight of Oldham’s writing. One of Oldham’s older songs ‘One With The Birds’, introduced the tricky concept of being ‘inhuman’ and perhaps not being as distant from animals as we might wish. ‘Beware’ seems to incorporate some of our less altruistic desires into a more intricate and complete portrait of being human. Sometimes this lies in directly confronting the more unpalatable sides of human nature, from selfishness and greed to controlling impulses. Sometimes it’s a recognition of the warmth that can be found in tiny physical details (the ‘belly laughs’ or ‘the way my stomach jiggles’). At other times, it’s even rueful or self deprecating (‘you say my kisses don’t even raise a six on a scale of one to ten’). It’s a richly nuanced depiction of human life that refuses to conform to anything as simplistic as a positive or negative viewpoint.
Elsewhere, he mischievously undercuts the tropes of the American blues tradition (‘I know everyone knows the trouble I have seen/That’s the thing about trouble you can love’) and seems preoccupied with the concept of work, particularly in relationships. At the moment, ‘My Life’s Work’ is striking me as one of his most powerful and strident songs to date.
Musically, the album is as confident and audacious a work as any in Oldham’s illustrious canon. The first interjection of the choir on ‘Beware Your Only Friend’ immediately betrays the album’s wry humour (‘I want to be your only friend’, sings Oldham, ‘does that sound scary?’ responds the choir). Throughout the album, backing vocals conspire to add depth and power. The instrumentation is also correspondingly lavish, with plenty of fiddles, flutes, cornets and even the odd saxophone solo. On ‘Heart’s Arms’, Oldham explores the dramatic potential of sudden dynamic contrasts.
Yet ‘Beware’ is also an embrace of country music’s subtleties as well as its potential for luxury. There’s the gentle shuffle of ‘I Don’t Belong To Anyone’ or the more reflective, delicate lilt of ‘Death Final’, both excellent songs. Often the rhythmic foundation comes more from hand percussion than a full drum kit, a neat trick that lends space to the music where it might otherwise have been cluttered. This works particularly well on the extraordinary, dream-like closing track ‘Afraid Ain’t Me’.
There’s also a melodic familiarity to some of the tracks here that somehow manages to be more of a strength than a weakness. Oldham has certainly done this before – with ‘One With The Birds’ having borrowed heavily from Gram Parsons’ ‘Hickory Wind’. Here, ‘Beware Your Only Friend’ reminds me slightly of ‘Octopus’ Garden’, although it’s admittedly hard to imagine Ringo Starr singing these words. More notably perhaps, ‘Without Work, You Have Nothing’ strongly resembles the old Jerome Kern standard ‘The Way You Look Tonight’. These borrowings make the songs sound rooted in history, but Oldham takes these melodies to a wildly different place.
Oldham has never made a bad album as such, but sometimes they’ve seemed either overly conceptual (‘Sings Greatest Palace Music’) or have hidden some depths within considerable subtleties (‘The Letting Go’). ‘Beware’ is an immediate and authoritative statement, but one that seems likely to have a durable quality too. Straightforwardly, for such a contrarian, these are outstanding songs, delivered with a distinctive authorial voice.
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Solo Pornography
AC Newman – Get Guilty (Matador, 2009)
Neko Case – Middle Cyclone (Anti, 2009)
This week two solo albums arrive from members of the infectious, zany power-pop supergroup New Pornographers. Whilst Neko Case has, over several albums now, established her own signature style, informed by backwoods country, Byrdsian twang and classic pop, AC Newman’s solo career has struggled to exist as a proposition distinct from his parent band. Newman writes the majority of the songs for New Pornographers, and their best albums arguably succeed because Dan Bejar’s excursions into weird, fantastical stream-of-consciousness provide some balance to Newman’s relentless pop sensibility. A whole album of Newman confections might well be difficult to digest.
‘Get Guilty’ is a big improvement on ‘The Slow Wonder’. That album had been frontloaded with excellent songs only to veer off into more obtuse, meandering territory. Whilst not quite as consistent as the best of the New Pornographers albums, ‘Get Guilty’ maintains a more engaging standard throughout. It succeeds partly through being more ramshackle and less overblown than the last New Pornographers outing, the disappointing ‘Challengers’. There’s a big emphasis on rhythmic clatter and percussive drive, most effectively on ‘Like A Hitman, Like A Dancer’. Whilst the arrangements are frequently lush, there’s a roughness around the edges that lends the music some endearing imperfections. In addition to this, there are unusual choices of instruments, including recorders and melodicas. It feels loose and fun, rather than over-composed.
The pomp-pop of ‘Challengers’ is refined into a more agreeable proposition on two tracks - the Spector-ish opener ‘There Are Maybe Ten Or Twelve’ and ‘The Changeling’, which seems to recast Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ as a drunken lurch. Both are bold, chiming, confident performances. On a second play, I wonder whether a better comparison might even be the lavish, irresistible early pop singles of the Bee Gees, minus the squeaky falsettos of course.
Elswhere, as might be expected, Newman’s predilection for relentlessly summery melodies presides. The first four tracks represent Newman at his strongest – combining this tendency with a slightly ragged musical delivery and an abundance of rhythmic quirks and tricks. ‘Too Many Prophets’ and ‘The Heartbreak Rides’ are among his most direct songs, where his tendency for lyrical verbosity and awkwardness doesn’t intrude too much on the overall performance. It would be easy to view Newman’s chirpy enthusiasm as irritating – but there’s also something undeniably delightful about their impact. Even the more translucent songs that constitute the final third of the record have a steely conviction and confidence.
Neko Case’s songs on ‘Middle Cyclone’ are less openly enthusiastic and insistent than Newman’s but, I suspect, ultimately more enduring. Here, she has refined and polished her sound without losing her idiosyncratic qualities as a songwriter. The BBC website describes ‘Middle Cyclone’ as a set of simple country songs but I can’t help feeling that underestes its achievement and misunderstands Case’s strategy. 2002’s ‘Blacklisted’ was something of a pivotal point in her career, the point at which she abandoned ‘Her Boyfriends’, took songwriting control and started to develop a stranger, reverb-laden sound evocative of fairytales and sinister menace. It was the perfect context for her unusual, sometimes creepy metaphors. Whilst ‘Middle Cyclone’ certainly presents a smoother, more approachable version of this sound, Case still inhabits her own unique space and in some ways it represents an expansion of her language.
‘People Got A Lotta Nerve’, the taster freely distributed around the internet, is in some ways quite misleading. Its twelve string guitar jangle and hummable chorus suggest an immediacy and directness not always in evidence elsewhere. Some of these songs are more complex creations. Indeed, sometimes when the surface appearance of a song is disarmingly simple, closer listening reveals that there’s much more than first meets the ear.
This is particularly true of the delightful title track. Its delicate strum and hushed, restrained vocal make it sound remarkably straightforward. The music box counter melody almost (but not quite) sends it into the realm of tweeness. Close listening, however, reveals an odd structure veering between bars of 5 and 6 in an unpredictable pattern. It’s a love song of sorts, or at least about the difficulty in accepting the need for love. The lyrics are both clever and achingly bittersweet. It’s a quiet gem and one of a handful of songs here to deal more directly with the feeling of falling in love.
There’s still a characteristic helping of magical realism though and Case’s preoccupation with the animal kingdom continues apace, now further enhanced by broader nature metaphors, as the title suggests. On the opening ‘This Tornado Loves You’, Case casts herself as a force of nature, wanting to ‘carve your name across three counties’. It’s one of many striking images liberally scattered throughout this album – another favourite is the key line from ‘Prison Girls’ – ‘I love your long shadows and your gunpowder eyes’.
For every crisp and immediate song here (the driving rock of ‘I’m an Animal’ is probably the closest thing here to something New Pornographers might produce), there is something distinctly odd. ‘Fever’ is full of weird and wonderful sounds, from the clicking sound of drum rims to discomforting guitar effects. Some of these tracks were recorded in Case’s rural barn, in which she utilised eight upright pianos.
‘Polar Nettles’ and ‘Vengeance is Sleeping’ both benefit from that underlying sense of barbarous threat that makes even her softest, most skeletal songs sound unusual. The longer ‘Prison Girls’ and ‘The Pharoahs’ essentially restate Case’s talent for narrative driven songs set to lilting shuffles. Neither perhaps breaks new ground for her (the former sounds like a slower version of ‘Deep Red Bells’) but both serve to emphasise her core talents with effortless ease.
The two judiciously selected cover versions also remind us how superb an interpreter Neko Case is. Her version of Sparks’ ‘Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth’, surgically removing any sense of playful irony or parody associated with the original band, is so good as to make me wonder whether all albums should be compelled to include a Sparks cover. Nilsson’s anguished, but also blackly humorous ‘Don’t Forget Me’ seems like a more obvious choice, but that shouldn’t take anything away from her thoughtful and composed delivery.
‘Middle Cyclone’ is a resplendent album that rewards more and more with every play. From the unashamed brutality of a line like ‘the next time you say forever, I will punch you in the face’ to the confessional tenderness of its title track, it contains a wealth of personal emotional directness not heard on its immediate predecessors. Yet it sacrifices little in its quest for broader appeal – this is still a strange, murky, half-fantastical world. My only reservation is the bonus track – a whopping 31 minutes of ambient sound from the pond at the aforementioned barn that is almost as long as the rest of the album. Sorry, but that’s just an unnecessarily large and wasteful file that almost undercuts the haunting beauty of everything that has gone before.
Neko Case – Middle Cyclone (Anti, 2009)
This week two solo albums arrive from members of the infectious, zany power-pop supergroup New Pornographers. Whilst Neko Case has, over several albums now, established her own signature style, informed by backwoods country, Byrdsian twang and classic pop, AC Newman’s solo career has struggled to exist as a proposition distinct from his parent band. Newman writes the majority of the songs for New Pornographers, and their best albums arguably succeed because Dan Bejar’s excursions into weird, fantastical stream-of-consciousness provide some balance to Newman’s relentless pop sensibility. A whole album of Newman confections might well be difficult to digest.
‘Get Guilty’ is a big improvement on ‘The Slow Wonder’. That album had been frontloaded with excellent songs only to veer off into more obtuse, meandering territory. Whilst not quite as consistent as the best of the New Pornographers albums, ‘Get Guilty’ maintains a more engaging standard throughout. It succeeds partly through being more ramshackle and less overblown than the last New Pornographers outing, the disappointing ‘Challengers’. There’s a big emphasis on rhythmic clatter and percussive drive, most effectively on ‘Like A Hitman, Like A Dancer’. Whilst the arrangements are frequently lush, there’s a roughness around the edges that lends the music some endearing imperfections. In addition to this, there are unusual choices of instruments, including recorders and melodicas. It feels loose and fun, rather than over-composed.
The pomp-pop of ‘Challengers’ is refined into a more agreeable proposition on two tracks - the Spector-ish opener ‘There Are Maybe Ten Or Twelve’ and ‘The Changeling’, which seems to recast Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ as a drunken lurch. Both are bold, chiming, confident performances. On a second play, I wonder whether a better comparison might even be the lavish, irresistible early pop singles of the Bee Gees, minus the squeaky falsettos of course.
Elswhere, as might be expected, Newman’s predilection for relentlessly summery melodies presides. The first four tracks represent Newman at his strongest – combining this tendency with a slightly ragged musical delivery and an abundance of rhythmic quirks and tricks. ‘Too Many Prophets’ and ‘The Heartbreak Rides’ are among his most direct songs, where his tendency for lyrical verbosity and awkwardness doesn’t intrude too much on the overall performance. It would be easy to view Newman’s chirpy enthusiasm as irritating – but there’s also something undeniably delightful about their impact. Even the more translucent songs that constitute the final third of the record have a steely conviction and confidence.
Neko Case’s songs on ‘Middle Cyclone’ are less openly enthusiastic and insistent than Newman’s but, I suspect, ultimately more enduring. Here, she has refined and polished her sound without losing her idiosyncratic qualities as a songwriter. The BBC website describes ‘Middle Cyclone’ as a set of simple country songs but I can’t help feeling that underestes its achievement and misunderstands Case’s strategy. 2002’s ‘Blacklisted’ was something of a pivotal point in her career, the point at which she abandoned ‘Her Boyfriends’, took songwriting control and started to develop a stranger, reverb-laden sound evocative of fairytales and sinister menace. It was the perfect context for her unusual, sometimes creepy metaphors. Whilst ‘Middle Cyclone’ certainly presents a smoother, more approachable version of this sound, Case still inhabits her own unique space and in some ways it represents an expansion of her language.
‘People Got A Lotta Nerve’, the taster freely distributed around the internet, is in some ways quite misleading. Its twelve string guitar jangle and hummable chorus suggest an immediacy and directness not always in evidence elsewhere. Some of these songs are more complex creations. Indeed, sometimes when the surface appearance of a song is disarmingly simple, closer listening reveals that there’s much more than first meets the ear.
This is particularly true of the delightful title track. Its delicate strum and hushed, restrained vocal make it sound remarkably straightforward. The music box counter melody almost (but not quite) sends it into the realm of tweeness. Close listening, however, reveals an odd structure veering between bars of 5 and 6 in an unpredictable pattern. It’s a love song of sorts, or at least about the difficulty in accepting the need for love. The lyrics are both clever and achingly bittersweet. It’s a quiet gem and one of a handful of songs here to deal more directly with the feeling of falling in love.
There’s still a characteristic helping of magical realism though and Case’s preoccupation with the animal kingdom continues apace, now further enhanced by broader nature metaphors, as the title suggests. On the opening ‘This Tornado Loves You’, Case casts herself as a force of nature, wanting to ‘carve your name across three counties’. It’s one of many striking images liberally scattered throughout this album – another favourite is the key line from ‘Prison Girls’ – ‘I love your long shadows and your gunpowder eyes’.
For every crisp and immediate song here (the driving rock of ‘I’m an Animal’ is probably the closest thing here to something New Pornographers might produce), there is something distinctly odd. ‘Fever’ is full of weird and wonderful sounds, from the clicking sound of drum rims to discomforting guitar effects. Some of these tracks were recorded in Case’s rural barn, in which she utilised eight upright pianos.
‘Polar Nettles’ and ‘Vengeance is Sleeping’ both benefit from that underlying sense of barbarous threat that makes even her softest, most skeletal songs sound unusual. The longer ‘Prison Girls’ and ‘The Pharoahs’ essentially restate Case’s talent for narrative driven songs set to lilting shuffles. Neither perhaps breaks new ground for her (the former sounds like a slower version of ‘Deep Red Bells’) but both serve to emphasise her core talents with effortless ease.
The two judiciously selected cover versions also remind us how superb an interpreter Neko Case is. Her version of Sparks’ ‘Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth’, surgically removing any sense of playful irony or parody associated with the original band, is so good as to make me wonder whether all albums should be compelled to include a Sparks cover. Nilsson’s anguished, but also blackly humorous ‘Don’t Forget Me’ seems like a more obvious choice, but that shouldn’t take anything away from her thoughtful and composed delivery.
‘Middle Cyclone’ is a resplendent album that rewards more and more with every play. From the unashamed brutality of a line like ‘the next time you say forever, I will punch you in the face’ to the confessional tenderness of its title track, it contains a wealth of personal emotional directness not heard on its immediate predecessors. Yet it sacrifices little in its quest for broader appeal – this is still a strange, murky, half-fantastical world. My only reservation is the bonus track – a whopping 31 minutes of ambient sound from the pond at the aforementioned barn that is almost as long as the rest of the album. Sorry, but that’s just an unnecessarily large and wasteful file that almost undercuts the haunting beauty of everything that has gone before.
Friday, February 20, 2009
Hold Your Horses...
M Ward - Hold Time (4AD, 2009)
Reviewing records is a difficult business sometimes, and as this blog is very much a labour of love, I don’t even get the satisfaction of financial remuneration. Partially for that reason I prefer my writing here not to focus too much on carping and negativity. But I also want to write about this new M Ward album and all the reservations I have with it, in much the same way as I wanted to write about My Morning Jacket’s ‘Evil Urges’ or Spiritualized’s ‘Songs in A & E’.
I’ve so far liked pretty much everything Matt Ward has produced, from his John Fahey-inspired works for guitars to his brilliant conceptual pop albums ‘Transfiguration of Vincent’ and ‘Transistor Radio’, the latter a particular favourite. His more recent albums have seen him move arguably in a more conventional direction. This has been unproblematic though given his complete mastery of the pop song form. Last year’s collaboration with actress and singer Zooey Deschanel was as straightforward and reverential a record as he has yet produced, but the songs were suitably infectious and charming. So why am I struggling so much with ‘Hold Time’, a record that in many ways feels like a natural progression from ‘Post War’ and the She & Him album and which some writers are proclaiming as his best work to date?
Everything about ‘Hold Time’, from its syrupy sound to its handsome packaging, seems like an attempt by Ward to broaden his audience. In principle, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this of course. Who could resent a musician of such quality filling larger concert halls or actually selling some records? Nevertheless, it ought to be possible for this to happen without Ward sacrificing too many of his idiosyncratic qualities. Almost every track on ‘Hold Time’ seems to present a reduced, watered-down version of Ward’s characteristic timeless songcraft. Where once his writing sounded effortless, it now begins to sound more like pastiche. Sometimes these weaker facsimiles of his signature style are bolstered with saccharine strings, as it to hide the rather transparent weaknesses in the songs. The bizarre addition of echo-laden glam rock drums on a handful of tracks also feels like a conspicuous error of judgement.
Some of these songs are undeniably pretty (‘One Hundred Million Years’, the nimble shuffle of ‘Fisher of Men’, the jaunty single ‘Never Had Nobody Like You’) but none appear to be all that memorable or affecting. Somewhat unexpectedly, if there’s a connecting theme to this record it appears to be one of born again Christianity. Again, I don’t have a particular problem with this – but it would be good if the delivery of the songs could match the gospel fervour of some of the song’s themes. Instead, Ward mostly sounds comfortable, laconic, sometimes even detached. This is particularly noticeable on the light, bland strum of the opener ‘For Beginners’.
I’ve not taken issue with his voice before, even though he’s never been a technically gifted singer. Yet the use of the same old-timey microphone effect on every song here has possibly now become a repetitive and lazy trope. So much of ‘Hold Time’ sounds insincere or ironic but Ward’s obvious love of classic pop suggests this isn’t intentional at all.
Even in areas where he was once supremely assured, Ward can now be found floundering. His interpretations of the songs of others often imbued them with mystery or strangeness, particularly that fine version of David Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’. The ghastly, protracted and painful-for-all-the-wrong-reasons duet with Lucinda Williams on Don Gibson’s ‘Oh Lonesome Me’ may be the worst thing he’s recorded. Lucinda’s usually convincing grittiness somehow sounds forced and affected in this context, and the string arrangement is horrendous. He makes a more conscious attempt to reinvent his source material with the take on Buddy Holly’s ‘Rave On’ but it’s something of a failure nonetheless. By lobotomising the song’s energy and impetus, it ends up occupying a fairly meaningless limbo. It’s too lightly swinging to be melancholy, but not vibrant enough to be celebratory. It’s the sort of thing which would work marvellously in Susanna Wallumrod’s hands – she would have transformed it into something unbearably sad. Ward just renders it emotionless.
The point of comparison that keeps creeping into my mind is Lambchop’s ‘Aw C’Mon/No, You Come On’ double set, where some decent songs were smothered in arrangements that too frequently had more schmaltz than soul. In Ward’s case, things pick up considerably towards the end of the album when he abandons the lavishness and opts for something more fundamental – ‘Epistemology’ has a driving rhythm, whilst ‘Shangri-La’ is appealing in its dustiness. It’s arguably too little too late though.
For the all the effort to spruce up the sound, ‘Hold Time’ ends up sounding like a musical shrug. There’s a dispassionate distance and aloofness to many of these songs. Where critical reservations have been expressed about this album, they have focussed on the transparent lack of Ward’s dexterous, quirky guitar playing. I don’t think this is the main problem, as that had already started to be pushed into the background on ‘Post War’. There’s something else missing – something less tangible but much more significant - an allure, a sense of mystery or palpable emotion. It’s somehow very dry and unmoving.
Are there any other M Ward admirers feeling the same way about ‘Hold Time’? I’d like to hear your thoughts in the Comments field below!
Reviewing records is a difficult business sometimes, and as this blog is very much a labour of love, I don’t even get the satisfaction of financial remuneration. Partially for that reason I prefer my writing here not to focus too much on carping and negativity. But I also want to write about this new M Ward album and all the reservations I have with it, in much the same way as I wanted to write about My Morning Jacket’s ‘Evil Urges’ or Spiritualized’s ‘Songs in A & E’.
I’ve so far liked pretty much everything Matt Ward has produced, from his John Fahey-inspired works for guitars to his brilliant conceptual pop albums ‘Transfiguration of Vincent’ and ‘Transistor Radio’, the latter a particular favourite. His more recent albums have seen him move arguably in a more conventional direction. This has been unproblematic though given his complete mastery of the pop song form. Last year’s collaboration with actress and singer Zooey Deschanel was as straightforward and reverential a record as he has yet produced, but the songs were suitably infectious and charming. So why am I struggling so much with ‘Hold Time’, a record that in many ways feels like a natural progression from ‘Post War’ and the She & Him album and which some writers are proclaiming as his best work to date?
Everything about ‘Hold Time’, from its syrupy sound to its handsome packaging, seems like an attempt by Ward to broaden his audience. In principle, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this of course. Who could resent a musician of such quality filling larger concert halls or actually selling some records? Nevertheless, it ought to be possible for this to happen without Ward sacrificing too many of his idiosyncratic qualities. Almost every track on ‘Hold Time’ seems to present a reduced, watered-down version of Ward’s characteristic timeless songcraft. Where once his writing sounded effortless, it now begins to sound more like pastiche. Sometimes these weaker facsimiles of his signature style are bolstered with saccharine strings, as it to hide the rather transparent weaknesses in the songs. The bizarre addition of echo-laden glam rock drums on a handful of tracks also feels like a conspicuous error of judgement.
Some of these songs are undeniably pretty (‘One Hundred Million Years’, the nimble shuffle of ‘Fisher of Men’, the jaunty single ‘Never Had Nobody Like You’) but none appear to be all that memorable or affecting. Somewhat unexpectedly, if there’s a connecting theme to this record it appears to be one of born again Christianity. Again, I don’t have a particular problem with this – but it would be good if the delivery of the songs could match the gospel fervour of some of the song’s themes. Instead, Ward mostly sounds comfortable, laconic, sometimes even detached. This is particularly noticeable on the light, bland strum of the opener ‘For Beginners’.
I’ve not taken issue with his voice before, even though he’s never been a technically gifted singer. Yet the use of the same old-timey microphone effect on every song here has possibly now become a repetitive and lazy trope. So much of ‘Hold Time’ sounds insincere or ironic but Ward’s obvious love of classic pop suggests this isn’t intentional at all.
Even in areas where he was once supremely assured, Ward can now be found floundering. His interpretations of the songs of others often imbued them with mystery or strangeness, particularly that fine version of David Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’. The ghastly, protracted and painful-for-all-the-wrong-reasons duet with Lucinda Williams on Don Gibson’s ‘Oh Lonesome Me’ may be the worst thing he’s recorded. Lucinda’s usually convincing grittiness somehow sounds forced and affected in this context, and the string arrangement is horrendous. He makes a more conscious attempt to reinvent his source material with the take on Buddy Holly’s ‘Rave On’ but it’s something of a failure nonetheless. By lobotomising the song’s energy and impetus, it ends up occupying a fairly meaningless limbo. It’s too lightly swinging to be melancholy, but not vibrant enough to be celebratory. It’s the sort of thing which would work marvellously in Susanna Wallumrod’s hands – she would have transformed it into something unbearably sad. Ward just renders it emotionless.
The point of comparison that keeps creeping into my mind is Lambchop’s ‘Aw C’Mon/No, You Come On’ double set, where some decent songs were smothered in arrangements that too frequently had more schmaltz than soul. In Ward’s case, things pick up considerably towards the end of the album when he abandons the lavishness and opts for something more fundamental – ‘Epistemology’ has a driving rhythm, whilst ‘Shangri-La’ is appealing in its dustiness. It’s arguably too little too late though.
For the all the effort to spruce up the sound, ‘Hold Time’ ends up sounding like a musical shrug. There’s a dispassionate distance and aloofness to many of these songs. Where critical reservations have been expressed about this album, they have focussed on the transparent lack of Ward’s dexterous, quirky guitar playing. I don’t think this is the main problem, as that had already started to be pushed into the background on ‘Post War’. There’s something else missing – something less tangible but much more significant - an allure, a sense of mystery or palpable emotion. It’s somehow very dry and unmoving.
Are there any other M Ward admirers feeling the same way about ‘Hold Time’? I’d like to hear your thoughts in the Comments field below!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)