Country Round-Up: Kris Kristofferson; Patty Loveless
There was a movement in the late 1960s and into the 70s– the Outlaw Movement– to return country music to its earthy, human roots– and to reject the trendy sounds of Nashville, which had (get this) grown increasingly prone to gloss and dumbed-down polish. Some things never change: It’s 2009, the mainstream country radio is inexplicably aping its production values from 1980s rock music. Whatever. I’ve heard two new country releases that probably won’t make waves on the radio, but they remind me of what makes the simplicities of country music some of the most sublime musical pleasures there are. These records live up to the outlaw country credo– only one in sound, but both in spirit.
Kris Kristofferson – Closer to the Bone
How cool is Kris Kristofferson? This cool: For the title track to his new album, he enlists none other than Bob Dylan as his singing partner. Not only that, but it’s hands down the best song Dylan’s been involved with all year, though it was written solely by Kristofferson.
Dylan’s presence on the album, by the way, is uncredited: Kristofferson knows he’s cool, so he doesn’t feel the need to rub it in our faces. That sums up the modest spirit of Closer to the Bone, an album that lives up to its title by stripping away all but the bare essentials of melody and human emotion. Kristofferson– himself one of the architects of outlaw country– keeps that spirit alive here with an album of warm, meditative country shuffles, most of them based around acoustic guitar, harmonica, and perhaps a sparse rhythm section. These are quiet songs that could be sung around a campfire, and they’d have made a guy like Waylon Jennings proud.
And like Jennings, Kristofferson doesn’t let his tough-guy exterior and the spartan setting of his songs obscure his nakedly romantic heart: Indeed, by cutting away everything but the songs themselves, Kristofferson creates an album of uncommon intimacy, one in which the true riches lie in the words, the melodies, and the character-giving cracks in the singer’s weathered voice. Some of these songs are love songs; others, tributes to the dead or the grieving. One is dedicated to Johnny Cash, and another is about Sinead O’Connor. All of them are filled with wisdom, compassion, and a good-natured humor that make the kinds of songs you don’t just hear once and forget– they’re the kind of songs you feel like you could keep with you as you grow.
Patty Loveless – Mountain Soul II
Don’t let the II fool you: Patty Loveless is too much of a class act to make a rote sequel. One wouldn’t blame here, of course– the original Mountain Soul album, which mined the rich tradition of bluegrass, flew in the face of what was played on country radio at the time of its release, and it remains not just a high watermark for Loveless, but, for many fans of authentic country music, one of the genre’s best offerings of the decade. Still she resisted, in spite of persistent urging from her fans, until 2009– a time when, if the music on the new disc is any indication, the climate around her and the creativity within her made it the right moment to revisit the Mountain Soul aesthetic in spirit, if not exactly in form.
The differences are these: The first record was a collection of bluegrass standards sprinkled with a few originals, while the new one contains bluegrass cuts alongside other country nuggets given mountain-music treatment, as well as some brand new songs. It’s a much more eclectic set, then, though the sound of the album is every bit as rugged and lived-in as the original. Country and bluegrass musicians of great renown join Loveless here, but it’s the songs that matter, and they’re all killer: But what really impresses is just how timely they are. More than one of these songs testifies to financial breakdown– though most of these songs are very old, it feels as much a chronicle of 2009 as any album I’ve heard this year– and even the songs about love and loneliness have a universal spark to them. As with her last album, Sleepless Nights, Loveless here proves that great country music is essentially just soul music with a twang, and as such this music is moving and positively ageless. It’s another high point in a career that has seen one masterful record after another for the past ten years or more.
CT Review: Joe Henry
Has it really been more than a month since my last Joe Henry-related post? Shame on me. For those who just can’t get enough, my Christianity Today review of new album Blood from Stars– still the best record I’ve heard in 2009– is now available online. And of course, my full review of the album is still posted here.
The Avett Brothers: “I and Love and You”
Let’s start by dispensing with the inevitable outrage: Though the Avett Brothers have largely swapped their banjos for pounding pianos and replaced their laid-back ballads and string-band hootenanies with string-drenched pop– and though they recorded new album I and Love and You with slick producer Rick Rubin after signing to their first major label– the one thing they haven’t done is sell out. Yes, the album is polished and poppy, and some fans are destined to hate it, but there’s nothing calculated about this music, and there’s not one iota of pretense. If the Avetts were changing things up for the sake of mainstream appeal, that would be one thing, but in truth, they’ve never been truer to themselves: I and Love and You finds the brothers at their most unabashedly Avett-y.
Admittedly, they’ve always been a bit hard to pin down. Because of their foundation in banjos, upright bass, and acoustic guitars, and their reputation for explosive on-stage hoe-downs, the North Carolina trio has sometimes been pegged, largely erroneously, as a bluegrass band, a claim that at best muddies the truth and at worst misses it altogether; aside from the instruments, the occasional old-timey jam session, and the high and lonesome harmonies, there’s nothing particularly rural or old-fashioned about these guys, a thoroughly modern band with thoroughly old-fashioned values, musicians who love writing songs about their feelings and enjoy a good corny joke, who grew up listening to classic rock and write songs like the Beatles, even if they play them on mountain music instruments.
I and Love and You continues what the group started on Emotionalism: It doesn’t change the fundamental nature of their music, but clarifies it, brings it to the fore. So sure, Rubin strips away some of their mountain music trappings, but only to illustrate that they’ve never really been a mountain music band. Those influences aren’t completely gone by any means– the banjos are largely absent, but there’s still plenty of upright bass, and “Laundry Room” concludes with one of their best recorded jam sessions, even if it’s under half a minute long– but for the most part, the old-timey bluegrass influences are less a matter of sound and more a matter of attitude, evident not in the arrangements so much as the goofball humor, the good-old-boy sincerity, the pervading sense that these are good-hearted guys making music of simple virtue and earnestness.
So if these sound like the poppiest songs the Avetts have ever recorded, that’s somewhat true, but it’s not because they’re acting like something they’re not, but because they’re following their instincts and allowing their music to grow and mature in the direction it’s always been headed in. For anyone who heard Emotionalism, which maintained the group’s acoustic instrumental palette even as it found them writing songs in a more pop- and rock-influences vein, there’s nothing too surprising about the perky, McCartney-esque piano pop of “Kick Drum Heart,” or the wistful, quietly anthemic lilt of “The Perfect Space,” or even the melancholy balladry of the title song. There are some surprises here– like the rollicking surf-rock of “Slight Figure of Speech”– but they feel like logical extensions of the Avetts’ sound, while some of the more familiar-sounding material, like the acoustic ballad “Ten Thousand Words,” are updated to fit within this new, broader context, with subtle hints of organ or strings in the background.
It would be easy, at least initially, to pin all of these new developments on Rubin, but his influence here is hardly meddlesome; not only does this sound like the album the Avetts have been wanting to make all along, but beneath the slicked-up arrangements lie songs that are quintessentially Avett. These are the same guys, after all, who titled their last album Emotionalism, and their unflagging sincerity permeates every note of this music. They still sing about their feelings, comparing themselves to the Wizard of Oz tin man and singing lines like “I lost my fear in your arms/ I lost my tears in your car” with total, straight-faced commitment. They do have a sense of humor, but it’s the kind that you’d classify as “cute” as opposed to “hilarious.” The songs actually explore some dark thematic areas– it’s an album about love, of course, but a dark side of love, with want and obsession being common motifs– but because the Avetts make such endearingly straight-laced, old-fashioned metaphors and keep everything so earnest and rooted in heart-on-sleeve emotion, the album doesn’t feel dark or depressing, just very serious.
And they do take this music– though not necessarily themselves– very seriously, which occasionally makes the album a little grating, but mostly makes it lovable. Certainly, there’s little doubt that this is the record they wanted to make, and that it reflects who they are as musicians and songwriters more than any other they’ve made up to this point. How that plays out with fans and critics is anybody’s guess, but there’s no denying that this is eclectic, expansive, and very well-crafted music, and that the band believes in it whole-heartedly, which makes I and Love and You an album that’s very hard to dislike.
Landmarks: The Year 2004
I think I’ll always look back on 2004 as one of the richest musical years– certainly of this decade. With spectacular new releases, from veterans and rookies alike, and from innumerable different genres and pop idioms, the year was practically a deluge of truly landmark recordings, and I dare say that no other year will play as prominent a role in my Best of the Decade list. Or, for that matter, my all-time desert island list.
It was a year of towering twin peaks: Standing high above everything else and defining the year’s creative vibrancy were Nick Cave‘s two-disc Bad Seeds opus, Abattoir Blues and the Lyre of Orpheus, and Sam Phillips‘ spare, devastating break-up chronicle, A Boot and a Shoe. These two albums are masterpieces of very different kinds, and in my mind they are essentially tied for Album of the Year honors, although, for its sheer scope and audacity, I usually choose Cave’s album as the year’s “official” champion. And indeed, with all of his Seeds in tow and his poetic gift at the peak of its powers, Cave created a sprawling album of astonishing spiritual fervor; you’d have to go back to The Joshua Tree for another rock album of such burning, gospel-fueled passion. Smaller in scale but equally exploratory and profound was Phillips‘ album, a tightly-constructed gem that used a romantic break-up to address issues of suffering, providence, and grace. The impact of both of these albums on my own life– and my listening habits– is, to be quite honest, immeasurable.
But if those were the standouts, they were hardly the year’s only memorable albums. Going into 2004, the album I was most primed to hear was the new, long-delayed offering from U2. Of course this album turned out to be How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, and, to be frank, it’s one of my least favorite of their albums; that said, given what a profound blessing this band’s music has been in my life, that hardly means I didn’t like it. I’ve wavered a bit in just how much I like it, finding all of the songs to be good but the production and the cohesion of the album to be lacking; these days I consider it to be a slight disappointment, but the songs still mean a lot to me, so my attitude toward the album is primarily one of great fondness. But I’m the first to admit that, in 2004, Bono and the boys were out-U2ed by a band that can legitimately claim to be the heirs to the U2 throne– Arcade Fire, that rarest of bands that deserves every hyped-up word that’s been written about them. Their debut, Funeral, is a brave and stunningly assured work of catharsis and rich feeling, brimming with a youthful poetry, at once weary and romantic, that could only come from rock and roll.
Tom Waits released his edgiest, hippest, and altogether strangest album in 2004 (which is saying a lot, given Waits’ astonishingly weird career). Real Gone is a nasty little rock record that finds inspiration in everything from hip-hop to parlor folk. It’s Waits’ most daring experiment, pushing the aesthetics of Rain Dogs and Bone Machine to their breaking point. It’s also a profound reflection on history and sin, and in many ways it’s my most cherished Tom Waits album.
Another veteran singer/songwriter who topped himself in 2004 was the great Buddy Miller, whose Universal United House of Prayer was the year’s best gospel album, as well as one of its most profound– and compassionate– political statements. Released during a time of war, Miller‘s album sidestepped polemics in favor of spiritual songs bemoaning man’s depravity and begging for God’s grace. He preached peace through love and faith, and the songs– drawn from mountain music but filtered through rock and roll– matched the lyrics in their fervor and urgency.
Ron Sexsmith released one of the decade’s finest pure pop albums in Retriever, an album of grace and elegance that drew from a number of singer/songwriter traditions but came to be something far more, an incredible showcase of melody matched with lyrics brimming with beauty, sincerity, and truth. Sexsmith wrote about love as something rooted not in carnality, but in divinity; fittingly, his hooks were positively heavenly.
American roots music– everything from country to gospel– was rich and vibrant in 2004. In addition to the Buddy Miller album, of course, there was the Jack White-produced comeback album by Loretta Lynn, an album overflowing with energy, personality, humor, and storytelling virtuosity. Meanwhile, Ben Harper collaborated with the Blind Boys of Alabama for an irresistible gospel concoction– with rock underpinnings, of course– called There Will Be a Light. And Patty Griffin‘s Impossible Dream is a record of rich, devastating, and utterly mesmerizing sadness.
And speaking of rock, 2004 gave us formative recordings from some of the decade’s most promising and exciting bands, most notably The Black Keys‘ breakthrough album, Rubber Factory, and the fully-formed debut from The Hold Steady, Almost Killed Me. And then there was the Green Day album: American Idiot is a blockbuster and a modern-day classic, and for good reason; its mixture of political fire, rock and roll mayhem, and pop craftmanship make it one of the most ambitious mainstream rock albums of the decade, as well as one of the best.
Singer-songwriters were in fine form in 2004, too, particularly in indie music: Iron & Wine‘s Our Endless Numbered Days was a hushed, spooky reflection on death and fidelity, while Sufjan Stevens‘ Seven Swans was a hushed, spooky reflection on death and faith. Both are, in my opinion, the best albums yet made by the two respective artists.
And the beat goes on. AC Newman‘s The Slow Wonder is a pop gem. TV on the Radio‘s Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes revealed a band with a fully-formed voice that was entirely their own. Devendra Banhart‘s Rejoicing in the Hands is a riveting update on the old, weird Americana. And on and on.
That was 2004 for me. What were your favorites from that year?
Rain Machine: “Rain Machine”
On last year’s TV on the Radio album Dear Science, love shone as the one true light of hope in an increasingly dark world, a salvation both sure and strong. The album was rich in troubling incantations and ominous prophesies about war and decay, but it ended with a song called “Lover’s Day,” in which the band mixed images of love romantic and divine as they floated in a festive parade through the valley of death itself. Love is and always has been the answer, the song suggested– and in TVotR’s hands, it was no cliche.
Kyp Malone wrote and sang the lead vocal on that song, which makes it a peculiar thing to hear him, on his solo debut under the name Rain Machine, pen a song called “Love Won’t Save You.” Altogether less cheerful and cathartic than anything in the TVotR oeuvre, Rain Machine is an album dark, measured, and very frequently sad– so what’s changed for Kyp Malone? Has his belief in love’s redemption wavered, or was that always, only an act?
The answer, I think, is something far less sinister. Succinctly put, Rain Machine is a very different album than Dear Science. But obvious though that statement may be, its simplicity is deceptive: Though it feels like a very different work than anything Malone has made with David Sitek and Co., its distinguishing characteristics are initially rather difficult to pin down, as the music is rooted, at least on paper, in an aesthetic very similar to TV on the Radio’s.
But start with this: Rain Machine is a very personal album in a way that a record made by five different musicians could never quite be, especially when songwriting duties are split between them. Dear Science, was an indie-fied Sign ‘o the Times for a generation bred on Radiohead and U2, an experimental but nevertheless anthemic exploration of violence and despair in which the antidote to cultural decay was a healthy mixture of music, sex, and God. It was a statement, which Rain Machine never tries to be: Instead, it is an act of expression, a very individual vision of turmoil as seen not through the eyes of society, but through one man. Which is not to say that it is in any sense a confessional album, or that Malone’s concerns here are of an introspective nature– cultural concerns inform these tracks, and the lyrics are littered with burning crosses, references to racial tension and violence, and in some cases anecdotes ripped straight from the evening news– but Rain Machine is not a manifesto: It is simply Malone’s point of view.
That philosophy plays out in the sound of the album, too. You can hear it in the production– in how the polished beats of Dear Science, have been replaced by rickety hand percussion, for instance– but it’s most evident in the songs themselves: In how they stretch out with luxurious sprawl and leisurely pacing, more than half of the songs topping five minutes and three of them hitting eight; in how Malone engages his love of acoustic music, a couple of songs flirting with folk music; in how the music is meandering in the best possible way, a much looser, and also more mellow, album than any in the TVotR canon.
To put it another way, this is an album that clearly reflects how influential Malone’s voice is to TV on the Radio– all the seeds of their music are contained here, in more primitive form– but with Rain Machine he is able to do things Sitek would never let slide on a proper, full-band outing. Not only is it lo-fi and low-key, but it’s a terrifically ramshackle release, rougher and more individualistic than the more streamlined TV on the Radio albums. That’s even heard in “Give Blood,” the song here that most resembles a TVotR track; it’s a fuzzed-out funk track that could have fit on Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes, yet it’s more manic and marvelously unhinged than anything the band has ever done, too rough around the edges, too raggedly homemade to work within the context of TVotR. But for the most part, these songs are ballads, and on the whole it’s a much more intimate and idiosyncratic album than what we’re used to hearing from Malone.
Bizarrely, some have said that the album sounds basically like another TV on the Radio album, a statement that is somewhat true in terms of the style, but not in the actual sound of the album: This music simply feels different, as it is the sound of one gifted musician indulging his interests and obsessions and simply letting the music take him where it will. And indulgent the album may be, but it’s also beautiful and almost always mesmerizing, clearly made with love and care. (To be fair, the slow tempos bog down the last few songs, though, on their own, they’re fine tracks all.) If Dear Science, is an art-pop masterpiece– an album that would spawn at least a half-dozen hit singles in some alternate universe– then Rain Machine is its downbeat chaser, a very fine reflection on an artist whose very personal music proves infinitely rewarding to listeners with willing ears.
Islands: “Vapours”
There are two defining characteristics of Nick Thorburn’s work of which you need to be aware. For one, he is a tunesmith of uncommon finesse; his melodies are so simple it’s a constant amazement that they weren’t written decades earlier, and so addicting that his work is instantly memorable. And two, he is unusually obsessed with death – his songs tend to marry cheerful pop melodies to lyrics about human mortality, giving his music an oddly sinister mix of magic and morbidity that one might otherwise associate with a Brothers Grimm fairy tale.
Thorburn has followed his twin impulses to make some of the weirdest, most wonderful pop music of this young century — and for whatever reason, he seems to do his best work under the Islands moniker. (He’s also recorded as The Unicorns and Human Highway). The first Islands LP was the widescreen pop classic Return to the Sea, an album that scaled melodic heights and took surreal detours into hip-hop and calypso. After that, Thorburn stretched his two grand obsessions to their breaking point for the winding, death-haunted guitar-rock epic, Arm’s Way. The latter was an album of thrilling ambition, but tragically, it fell on deaf ears; most critics were so put off by its excess that they failed to recognize its imagination and its musicality, leaving it a grossly underappreciated gem.
Read the rest at Stereo Subversion.
Monsters of Folk: “Monsters of Folk”
It may be reductionist, but it’s nevertheless true: Monsters of Folk is indie rock’s Traveling Wilburys. So what if no one in the band is an archetype unto themselves, as Bob Dylan is, or possesses Roy Orbison’s gravitas, or George Harrison’s gifts as a tunesmith? In the niche world of indie music, there aren’t many who can claim superstar status, but Conor Oberst, M. Ward, and My Morning Jacket’s Jim James come close enough that Monsters qualifies, without question, as a bona fide supergroup.
There are other similarities to the Wilburys. They have their own multi-instrumentalist/uber-producer in Mike Mogis, here filling the Jeff Lynne role. Oberst was initially hailed as indie’s Dylan when he burst onto the scene under his Bright Eyes banner, and James himself recently recorded a tribute album to Harrison. In at least one respect, they even do the Wilburys one better: They play all of their own instruments—even the drums!
Read the rest at Stereo Subversion.
Richard Hawley: “Truelove’s Gutter” (Track-by-track version)
Note: A shorter review of this album can be found here. This much lengthier evaluation is a song-by-song exploration of the work’s central themes, and may be more useful for those who have heard the music already; if you’re new to the world of Richard Hawley, however, the shorter version might be a better starting point.
Richard Hawley’s music has always proved fertile haunting grounds for all manner of ghosts and spirits. His breakthrough album, Cole’s Corner, took its name from an actual street corner in Hawley’s native Sheffield; Cole’s Corner has long been a thing of the past, demolished to make room for new urban development, but Hawley ressurected it with disarming clarity, using it as a focal point for a meditation on broken love and friends long gone. As he made the follow-up to that album, Lady’s Bridge, Hawley lost his father, himself a respected, working musician with a long career in rockabilly; Hawley ended up cutting a jaunty little skiffle of his own for the album, called “Serious,” which sounded as though the elder Hawley’s spirit was still rattling around the studio, showing his son the way.
Now two albums after his Mercury Prize-nominated breakthrough, Hawley has made his most haunted– and haunting– album to date. Truelove’s Gutter is something altogether different from the two albums that came before it, and yet it sounds not like a departure, but a progression. Hawley’s trademark sound is something rooted in classic rock and roll balladry, velvety crooning, and brief flourishes of rockabilly and jazz. Some of his songs sound for all the world like forgotten entries in the Great American Songbook, though of course they were truly written in this young decade. Here, Hawley keeps his music rooted in those same influences, but strips it to the bone, into something skeletal and spooky, and he allows it to stretch out: Truelove’s Gutter is luxuriously slow and often very quiet– no modern pop singer uses silence as effectively as Hawley– but it unfolds naturally, with a strong sense of narrative but also a composer’s sense of dynamic ebb and flow.
More than the vast majority of albums in the world, this one is very much of a piece: There are no singles, and its story is revealed in such a way that listening to it only partially, or out of sequence, would be absurd. Its spiritual cousin is Sinatra’s classic late-night saloon album In the Wee Small Hours, for like that album– as well as the previous entries in Hawley’s canon– it’s an album of exquisite, enveloping sadness, though it is never depressing or difficult to hear. It is Hawley’s darkest record yet, and one could say, truthfully, that it is his dark night of the soul, or that it tells the tale of new love that slowly fades and dies, and while both of these statements are technically accurate, they do not capture the spirit of what Hawley is doing. This is not emo. There is zero self-pity, no wallowing, no wrist-cutting histrionics, no high-school journaling. Hawley is a romantic in every sense, and these songs are written from a place of dignity, empathy, and above all, wonder– they are, in short, profound testaments to human experience, excised of all banality or cliche.
The first song is called “As the Dawn Breaks,” and it lives up to its name: Hawley ushers in the album’s beginning slowly and carefully, as a bed of hazy atmospherics gradually gives way to a gently-strummed morning hymn. Hawley greets a new day, and a new love, with characteristicly simple poetry, and the song is a sweetly-crooned ode to love as a thing of promise and redemption. This song is paired with “Open Up Your Door,” a pleading but resolute appeal to the beloved with a melody that is as lovely and full of hope as Hawley’s “Valentine” melody was utterly devestating.
Some of Hawley’s familiar influences are at work here, but in different forms: “Ashes on the Fire” is a country song, but it’s stripped down to its bare essence, all spare and spooky. Actually, it sounds like a ghost story, though its tale is of a love whose fire has been reduced to just a few embers. Hawley’s poetry cuts to the bone, as well, speaking to brokenness but with no whining or melodrama: “My words like an arrow/ Aimed so much higher/ My bow broke asunder/ Ashes on the fire.” That said, what follows is a song that breaks away from Hawley’s past work– without losing sight of his roots– into something completely other. “Remorse Code” is one of the album’s two spacious epics, unfolding into nearly ten minutes in length, and it is a hypnotic composition of acoustic guitar and hand percussion, Hawley’s lyric devastating and at the fore. One critic has called the song “ambient,” but no, there’s nothing sleepy or indulgent here: Hawely enlivens the set with some of his typically sterling, rousing guitar solos.
Trulove’s Gutter, by the way, is the first Richard Hawley album since before Cole’s Corner that isn’t named after a real, geographic place; its setting, of course, is a purely literarey one but the songs are no less rooted in the real world. Hawley still maps the strange geography of the heart with painful precision, and though he is a romantic through and through, there is nothing romanticized about his worldview. “Don’t Get Hung Up in Your Soul” is another sweet hymn to the beloved, though this time it bears the full weight of brokenness and sorrow, not like the weightless songs that opened the record: “You’re the thorn and you’re the crown,” he tells his lover, signifying both love’s pain and its ultimate joy.
This is an album on which Hawley plays to his strengths, but takes them into daring new places and startling new contexts– thus, rendering them with new meaning. He has long been a master of artful melodrama– anyone who has heard his utterly broken ballad “Valentine” or his exhilarating ode to romance, “Tonight the Streets Are Ours,” can attest to this– but on Truelove’s Gutter, he employs euphoria sparingly: “Soldier On” begins as a slow and steady crawl, but gradually builds and errupts into a crescendo of explosive violence, the lyric invoking both fractured love and apocalyptic cataclysm. But this is not the wide-eyed Panavision of those earlier songs from Lady’s Bridge: It’s simply the natural peak of a winding, uphill journey.
He couldn’t possibly top the impossible drama and tension of that song, so he doesn’t try: The song is followed with a gentle parlor-room folk song called “For Your Lover Give Some Time,” performed with just acoustic guitar and a mournful violin in the background. The spare setting keeps the emphasis on Hawley’s lyric, and it is the more wrenching on the whole set: “I will give up these cigarettes/ Stay at home and watch you mend the tears on your dress… and be your lover for all time/ Maybe I will drink a little less/ Come home early and not forget about the deaths/ And give you flowers from the graveyard now and then.” The song’s title phrase comes not like a platitude, but a hard-won lesson, spoken not triumphantly but in tears.
The album’s conclusion is, at nearly eleven minutes, its true epic centerpiece, and a conclusion that is both devastating in its sadness and awe-inspiring in its beauty. “Don’t You Cry” is both a sweet lulluby– sung with the richest compassion and empathy– and a sad survey of the valley of shadows. Hawley’s lyric invokes death and destruction– “unholy broken shadows,” stopped clocks and frozen lakes– but, in the wake of all that has happened on this record so far, his words of encouragement and hope are every bit as strong and as potent as the song’s sorrow.
And that is as great a triumph as this, or any other album, could attain: That it is an album so deeply sad and sorrowful, yet it leaves the listener not depressed, but enlivened by the wonder of it all, both in terms of Hawley’s remarkable music as well as the depth and richness of human experience that it invokes. Truelove’s Gutter is a journey of great emotion, and its demands on the listener are many, yet its rewards are more numerous still. Many albums leave the listener impressed, but few leave us in awe, which this album most surely does. Whether it’s Hawley’s finest moment yet is irrelevant, as his music is all so profound and exquisite, but surely this is the distillation of his music’s purest essence, the sound of a masterful artist coming into his own by breaking away into something utterly his own– something that can never, ever be repeated.
Film Break: “The Informant!”
I’m really wild about Steven Soderbergh’s latest, Matt Damon-starring picture, The Informant! You can read my review of this terrific film at CT Movies.
Vic Chesnutt: “At the Cut”
What exactly is so special about a chinaberry tree, that chopping it down should be such a dreadful, cataclysmic event? I have no idea, but hearing Vic Chesnutt narrate the saga of destruction in the garden is one of the most unsettling things I’ve heard this year, a spartan tale told in lean, precise language that just barely contains the violence circulating just beneath the surface. It’s quintessential Chesnutt on a number of levels, its carefully-controlled dynamics betraying the trained ear of a veteran musician, its sinister use of gothic archetypes suggesting a life-long Southerner who’s fully internalized the literary heritage of his home land.
If you think that’s heady praise for a musician most have never heard of, you’d be right. Though he was championed (and produced) by Michael Stipe in the 1980s, Chesnutt is an artist whose work has always been too bound to traditional songcraft to make him an indie rock star, and too concerned with atmosphere to fit in with iconoclasts like Tom Waits or Nick Cave. But if he never became a star, he’s always been a cult favorite and a steadily-working musician, quieting amassing a body of work that’s remarkably consistent, if dogged in its pursuit of a very narrow vision and aesthetic.
In a recording career that’s devoid of clunkers but also light on real standouts, new record At the Cut is as potent as anything Chesnutt has cut– not a departure from his familiar sound by any means, but arguably its most effective manifestation. And why wouldn’t it be? The album finds Chesnutt reuniting with producer Guy Picciotto and musicians from Silver Mt. Zion Orchestra, the same cast of collaborators who worked with Chesnutt on North Star Deserter, an album treasured by many fans as his best work. But Chesnutt is not an opportunist: He simply understands the importance of great group chemistry, which this ensemble has in spades, and it breathes life into this batch of Chesnutt originals, all of them evocative and generally unsettling.
The man really does have a literary flare, but not necessarily in the way you’d expect: His lyrics are lean and cut close to the bone, as much about what’s unsaid as what’s openly stated. But with a finely-honed economy of language, Chesnutt taps into the spooky, frequently violent tradition of Flannery O’Connor and the understated dread of William Faulkner– though his writing style isn’t straightforwardly narrative so much as it’s cinematic, each song feeling like a scene taken from a movie. His songwriting finesse is married to the deft work of his supporting musicians, who bring to the album a keen sense of dynamics and restraint.
The first two songs are At the Cut in miniature, laying out the parameters of its dynamic sprawl. “Coward” begins as a gently-strummed folk number, a lonely violin providing mournful accompaniment to Chesnutt’s acoustic guitar. More strings join in, and soon everything is quivering in nervous tension; when release comes, the song erupts into a monstrously grim crescendo, martial drums pounding as though driving a march through Mordor. The next song is “When the Bottom Fell Out,” the opening track’s polar opposite: It begins with just Chesnutt and his acoustic guitar, and it stays that way; the simple poetry in Chesnutt’s lyric, direct and evocative, is all that’s needed to make the song just as magnetic as the last.
The rest of the songs find themselves somewhere between these two poles. “We Hovered With Short Wings” is an ominously low, jazzy shuffle, all brushed snare and upright bass. “Concord Country Jubilee,” meanwhile, is a steadily swaying, sadsack country song. Exactly what happened at the jubilee, by the way, we’re not quite told, because it’s not important; something happened there, and in Chesnutt’s hands the emotional scars, the thick sense of loss and the pain of missed opportunities, is what really counts. Those are the sort of themes that are at the heart of this album, but it’s all wrapped up in eerie implications of violence; death is hinted at more than once, and the album’s central image is of a man being overcome by madness and taking an axe to a beloved tree. And then there’s “Coward,” in which the singer declares himself a scaredy-cat, but then warns that he’ll still scratch our eyes out if he’s backed into a corner.
The characters in these songs all seem a little off, a little mad, and always haunted by mortality: The album’s best song, “Flirted With You All My Life,” begins as nostalgia over a childhood crush but soon reveals itself to be a paean to life’s fragility and death’s inevitability. The lyrics, of course, are masterfully precise, and the musical backing is hypnotic. It’s the standout on an outstanding album; it won’t make Chesnutt a star, but by this point, who cares? If keeping a low profile allows him to keep making albums so rich in mystery and intrigue, so be it.
