Day 77: All My Faith Lost – The Hours

This is more like it. I don’t know if I would have usually said that this “is more like it,” but in the proximity of the hugely boring The Heavy, I’m extremely saying that. Still, this is odd music to get excited about.

All My Faith Lost are a male/female Italian duo who do atmospheric, dramatic music that damn near necessitates some thesaurusizing (I’m going with ‘stygian’). And when I say they do atmospheric music, I mean they create an unflinching, unwavering atmosphere from the first track on. They do goth minus the graveyard and black latex bodice, solemnity with romance, music to watch a time-lapse of a rose wilting to. Their palette is limited, but it doesn’t feel limited — they get a lot of versatility out of a (gorgeously recorded) piano ringing in a creaky-wooden room, their voices bouncing in a reverb tank, and some keyboard string section presets. Their way with these synth strings makes for slowly rippling Bohren-esque noirscapes, as they tend to just drone an incomplete, tense couple of notes, seldom alternating, while the piano splashes in it.

It’d be easy for this combo to plod along, and at times it does. In writing a series of yearning, romantic lullabies (whose lyrics are frequently unintelligible and sound like a mother cooing to her napping baby)  they effectively lull you into the album and leave you puzzled at its end, wondering how many songs just went by, trying to remember whether you just heard anything and struggling to recall what you heard. On “House of Incest“, they exhibit this quality to lovely effect, as the song moves glacially along.

Great music to make out to, or to lay in a hammock to. However it is going in my head as some kind of dream or drunk, some chunk of time deleted from my memory that I cannot access and can only judge by hints of recollections in its periphery — remembering feeling warm, feeling touched, but seeing only blackness.

Day 56: Nick Drake – Five Leaves Left

I liked Bryter Layter so much that I found it hard to imagine his other two albums, and that was made more difficult by how highly everyone I talked to spoke of them. Bryter Layter sounded perfect, and I almost dreaded hearing the others because I figured there was no way they could compare, or that they would go some other avenue that would challenge my opinion of Nick Drake himself.

Fortunately that wasn’t the case. Five Leaves Left actually raises my opinion of Drake significantly, because it has everything that made Bryter so good (the dazzling emotion) and executes it in basically a whole different style, losing the jazz sound of Bryter and using more baroque chamber instruments. The result is even more elegiac, with several songs retrospectively sounding like suicide notes. However, Drake had a way of making a suicide note sound somehow life-affirming and inspirational. I attribute it to his voice. He sings rainbows, as far as I’m concerned. His voice was a force bigger than any one man should probably be allowed to have.  “River Man” is, to me, the quintessential Nick Drake: attention-catching guitar rhythm, rambunctious string arrangements that fight for and against tonality, and that voice, whispering as loud as it can. I absolutely adored this album through and through.

Day 45: Nick Drake – Bryter Layter

Oh, my.

Here’s a good example of how important context can be when it comes to first impressions. I had only encountered Nick Drake in two soundtrack appearances: “One of These Things First” in Garden State, and “Fly” in The Royal Tenenbaums. Both songs were colored by their placement in the movie, and the tone of the story, and in both cases the movie ended up giving Drake’s tunes a sour taste for me.

In Garden State, the placement of “One of These Things First” echoes Wes Anderson’s characteristic use of songs, except without a touch of the nuance — the song’s lyrics line up with the curious adventure the protagonist finds himself drawn toward with the pixieish female lead, and the upbeat guitar pattern gives legs to a transitional scene. Neat, effective, and comes across as smug. I don’t remember where exactly “Fly” appears in The Royal Tenenbaums, but in that movie’s case it’s less a case of how the song appears than the movie itself. I love The Royal Tenenbaums, but the whole movie evokes a world that seems unreal; a quaint, insular, tweed-draped romance of eccentric people living in a fantastical brick walk-up in some abandoned corner of what is presumably New York, a world so effectively created that it has a gravity that pulls down any object placed near it. For the same reason I can’t stand hearing Nico or “Needle in the Hay”, hearing Nick Drake just makes me recall Tenenbaums. You’d think that would be a good thing, seeing as, I remind you, I did love that movie — its insistence upon its own aesthetic couldn’t undermine the simplistic brute force of the story and the inspired performances that carried it off — but the movie was so rebarbatively pretentious that anything associated with it has a wretched taint about it forever.

None of this is Nick Drake’s fault, anyway. But it did keep me from ever wanting to hear one of his albums. And as I’m learning more and more throughout the course of this project, I see this was folly, since Bryter Layter would have easily insinuated itself as a treasured piece of my musical experience at just about any point in my life. It says a lot, and says it better than I could here. Most albums I have gotten through in this project have had one or two tracks that I wanted to listen to over and over; this one had four (“At The Chime of a City Clock”, “Hazy Jane I”, “Fly”, and stand-out “Northern Sky”). The whole thing is unbearably pretty, and contains so many little musical jewels that I could quote them like hilarious lines from a movie (the captivatingly expressive piano in “Northern Sky”, the redemption of that most repugnant of instruments, the harpsichord, in “Fly”, the way Drake delivers the line “And now if it’s time for recompense for what’s done, come, come sit down on a fence in the sun” in a talk-sing tone that gives me chills). But moreover, it has a mood and style so definitive that listening to “Fly” now almost makes me wonder if Wes Anderson made a movie around it.

Drake’s suicide paints a grim retrospective picture of this album, but even if Drake had lived to get over feeling “so sorry for himself” (“Poor Boy”) this would have stood as a testament to the tense expressiveness of the depressive mind as it writhes against the chains it binds itself in. A masterpiece.

 

Day 37: Kashiwa Daisuke – Program Music I

I put this one on as I left the house and by the time I walked to the bus stop, made the 15 minute ride, and got to work, the first track still wasn’t over. I think the only thing I can say about this album with any certainty is that it is long. It’s actually only 61 minutes long, but that 61 minutes consists of two tracks (35:57 and 25:59).

When I saw the run times, I expected wide open, droning soundscapes with little ado, and I was surprised. What this album is is hard to summarize in any lucid way; the closest I can come is ‘electronic post-classical’. The music is reminiscent of the long, emotional narratives of post-rock, except propelled by a conductor, a symphony, and a drum machine that is being eaten alive by some sort of computer virus.

The opener (heh, heh), “Stella”, is definitely my favorite track here. From start to finish it radiates brilliance. The first ten minutes alone are so pure and so dense with creativity that you could cut it with baby laxative and make three great long-players out of it. The first minute makes overtures at what is to come, but does so timidly, carried on a dripping-faucet piano pattern that rings over samples of water running, a train chugging, women giggling tentatively — all of which are subject to abrupt, cd-skip glitches and static. The sound is at once organic, tender, mechanical, and cold. After the 3 minute mark, guitars pan in and out of your ears, overfull with notes and spilling, and like that the album sneaks up on you: what sounds like a full orchestra emerges, as the previously desolate lead voices (the piano, the guitar figures) disappear into the crowd. As their forms become hard to discern, the orchestra takes up the pattern they’ve been playing for minutes now and becomes enormous. The dynamics hit the ceiling, and the drums stop sputtering, and everything achieves a cathartic clarity, and you look and realize the song still has 28 minutes to go.

I was gonna write this post a few hours ago, but for the first time in the life of this project I wanted to put it off so that I could get more listening in first, because honestly this album stumped me. I could not figure out what there was to say about it. It feels completely outside my ability to judge this in any way. I am in love with it. It is a shambling monstrosity, so full of grandeur that it is incomprehensible that it even exists. It is baffling to imagine this 60 insane minutes composed by one man. These two long pieces actually have continuity, and recurring themes. They juggle tempos and moods in a way that could be mistaken for fickleness, but once the shock of the initial listen is through and you really sink into it, and focus on it, there is an apparent momentum.

Making a 36 minute song could easily end up an act of wanton arrogance. It means you think what you have to say is so important that you can take as much time as you want and it will be alright. While this might typically be folly, in Kashiwa Daisuke’s case it is absolutely true, and that’s really what’s so breathtaking about this goddamn thing. After laying still, headphones on, and listening through the whole thing, I felt like I had heard more music than I have in the last few years combined. There’s a moment around 21:45 in “Stella” where the music climaxes and then recedes, leaving a lonely music box chiming in a woozy pixellated soundscape, seeming lost, the song’s pinnacle seeming abandoned, until with the slow twist of a volume knob it rises, tattered by distortion, the orchestra playing as the tape burns. In its finest moments, which are plentiful, Program Music I explodes with feeling. And not sadness, but feeling. Humanity. You are on an adventure, as the song refuses again and again to end or resolve in any big way, and you are attacked by crescendo after crescendo. By its end, when Daisuke applies his glitchy effects to the sounds of people getting up out of creaky wooden chairs and leaving the orchestra room, you realize just how far you have come. And half an hour later, you’re back in a room with a mic somewhere up near the ceiling above a piano where someone is again playing the intro’s plaintive figure and the room noise becomes a howling vacuum.

I haven’t said a word about the 2nd track, but everything that’s wonderful about the first applies. This album has earned a descriptor that I find hard to apply: ‘unique’. It is a bountiful, generous hour of unrestrained genius, that, once you can learn to stop expecting some kind of verse-chorus-verse cyclicity, once you can surrender yourself to it, proves itself capable of rewarding active and attentive listening better than almost anything else out there. An absolute must-hear, and an album I expect to revisit frequently later on in life.

Day 32: Everything But The Girl – The Language of Life

Hoo boy, did I ever not like this at all. I had the day off and woke up super early and couldn’t fall back to sleep, so I’ve pretty much been listening to this nonstop since 7 a.m. and after an entertaining first listen it was rapidly downhill.

The Language of Life is a perfect example of what people are probably usually cringing at when they accidentally hear the words “soft jazz.” By this point, they had already put out four well-reviewed albums. They went from the intimate, stripped-down Idlewild to deciding to hire every 80s session jazzist their studio budget could grasp, and the result is positively dreadful. The album abounds with anachronistic musical ornamentation, every little slack breath in its tunes filled with shakers, windchimes, bongos, and everything else that has become synonymous with “smooth jazz.” The instrumentation ends up distracting heavily from Tracey Thorn’s warm voice, which thanks to the production fads of the era ends up buried beneath its own reverb and multitracks rather than whispering on the mic like it ought to.

The whole album is reminiscient of Sade, except a lot whiter. It’s not an unredeemable listen, honestly, but its good moments are exceptionally rare. The tinkling piano solo in the eponymous track is jazz-drunk lovely, antagonistically polyrhythmic, and manages to upstage the whole album on its own by pointing out that their particular blend of “soft jazz” has a surfeit of the soft but is bereft of actual jazz. Thorne’s lyrics and vocals are really quite nice, which is a big part of why this album is frustrating. If it were stripped to its core elements — the voice, maybe a piano — it would obviously be fucking lovely, and this turns out to be a clear-cut case of either “less is more” or “if you’re not gonna do less, don’t do so fucking much more”.

I don’t know why I found this so hard to listen to all day. I think I just wasn’t in the mood for it. The thing is unlike most of the albums I found really hard to listen to, there was nothing intrusive about this album. Perhaps that was the problem. I had a long day of idle time, and would have enjoyed having something to sink my teeth into. Instead, Everything But The Girl firmly rooted themselves in the back of my perception, trying to keep low-key. Hours could go by without me noticing the album had started over. It is passive to the point of being frustrating, buffeting every dramatic movement in their songcraft with huge snowbursts of frigid synth. I guess that’s what bothers me about soft jazz. I love jazz’s antagonism, its willful disregard of tonality, its hostile use of rhythm, and moreover, how much beauty people have managed to find in the conflagration of those factors. Music like this is, to me, the sound of jazzists dying on record, as they scrape together a rent check playing rote pop-music parts and making an effort to draw as little attention as possible. Even most of the solos (the saxophone in “Letting Love Go“) sound unspontaneous and disinterested.

Pure subjectivity, but I’m gonna be glad to fall asleep and be done with this one.

Day 26: Neil Young – Harvest

This album was ubiquitous to me before I even put it on for the first time this morning. As has happened a few times so far, I had the fun “Oh, this song and this song were from this album?” experience as I ran through Heart of Gold, Old Man, and The Needle And The Damage Done. I remember those songs as tepid radio noise, songs I’d heard filtered through FM decay too many times to take seriously.

So when I fired this up and “Out On The Weekend” came through my earphones, I discovered that the notes I had heard played in those aforementioned hits when they appeared on the radio were only peaks jutting from a murky surface. “Out On The Weekend” deftly uses space as an instrument, thrusting you into a cavernous sound stage where the bass and drums are the only concrete sounds. Instruments are placed very delicately: Neil’s voice, a soulful harmonica, a restless acoustic guitar, and dizzyingly dissonant peals of pedal-steel guitar cry, kept discrete enough to keep from muddling together. You are put into the room with him, especially when you hear what sounds like his harmonica scraping against the microphone (around the 2:00 mark). It’s a killer opener, as it establishes a trusting intimacy that is maintained through the album. Young’s voice has a way of sounding forced but better for it, as if he knows he can’t vibrato as well as he wants to but knows the song needs it, and the opener’s sleeve-hearted lyrics seem to get lost somewhere between the banalities on the page (“See the lonely boy, out on the weekend/Trying to make it pay./Can’t relate to joy, he tries to speak and/Can’t begin to say”) and the sounds he emits. I could’ve actually just listened to this song all day.

The album keeps it up, running through styles in pairs of tracks. The most contentious numbers, “A Man Needs A Maid” and “There’s A World”, are constantly maligned for the inclusion of the London Symphony Orchestra. On the former, Young tries to scale a certain height with his voice, sounding low in the mix the whole time, fighting to be heard, but by the end of the song when the orchestral accompaniment is crashing down, he tries to sing against it and is drowned out. This is largely due to mastering limitations at the time: to make Young properly audible during the very loud section of the song, the volume of his voice would have to be cranked to uncomfortable levels. However, that this was not fixed on the remaster reflects on an important effect this imbalance contributed to the song. When Young cryptically confronts the difficulty of letting a woman into his life (the actress mentioned in the lyrics, his wife), the song bowls him over with its beauty, drowning out his plaintive reassurance to himself that “a man needs a maid”.

Hit or miss, every track lands somewhere and penetrates deeply. “Heart of Gold”, a true classic, teems with activity that radio over-play has made hard to notice. Young manages to fill every song with detail that manages never to sound busy. Even on his straightforward tunes, like “Are You Ready For The Country?”, the band sounds in perfect lockstep, playing off of and around each other, filling every second with shit that just plain sounds great. No matter the effect his band could have, no matter the recording techniques, it all goes out the window on “The Needle And The Damage Done”, where Young sings about losing his friends and fellow artists to drugs. He sounds like he’s in that delirium beyond despair, where one’s feelings couldn’t possibly surmount the bleakness they face. And this is where you see what lies behind all the recording techniques, the orchestra, the gleaming radio gold. Behind it all is a man exhuming an unfathomably deep store of pain, and using a pluckish guitar melody to burrow deep inside you and see whether you have it too.

Day 24: Charlie Rich – The Most Beautiful Girl – 20 Greatest Hits

For those unfamiliar with an artist, a best-of album can be immensely useful. It can show the progression an artist has taken from their oldest hit to their newest, and give one a sense of the path the artist has taken. Something like that would be perfect for Charlie Rich, an artist who had to try out quite a few styles. After trying to make an impression with some jazz and blues numbers he was writing, he caught the attention of people at  Sun Records who hired him as a writer and gave him a crash course in writing pop, giving him a stack of Jerry Lee Lewis records to study. Years of middling releases and failed hits later, Sun Records was struggling, and he was taken in by Billy Sherrill, architect of Countrypolitan, a budding genre that took strong Country vocals and put it over songs stacked to the rafters with impenetrable layers of strings and smooth female harmonies.

This tutelage handily synergized two factors: that Rich had a voice so damned sweet that it managed to infuse this repugnantly schmaltzy sound with honest-to-goodness soul, and that he was, by this point in his career, as desperate as he’d ever been. He had made sacrifices of integrity before (his frequent re-recording of his material over the course of his life leaving numerous iterations of his songs before his Countrypolitan makeover as evidence). Originally considering himself a Jazz pianist and having very little interest in Country, he had his piano taken away from him and ended up crooning on Vegas stages like a regular Tom Jones, and all the while plunged further into as many bottles as he could get his hands on.

The evolution of his style and the subsequent repurposing of his back catalog can be seen in the different iterations, recorded a decade apart, of “There Won’t Be Anymore”. The 1960s version is raw and bluesy, and lets his piano playing speak clearly as a fundamental voice in the music. The re-done 1970s version is more of a country ballad, with the Nashville sound starting to creep in. Rich’s voice is pushed toward the front even more, and given a hefty honk of reverb. It turns into into less of a brusque, smoky song and tones it down, remixing it into a saccharine ballad. Fortunately, as I said, Rich’s sonorous voice was seemingly made for this style of music, as it rings true enough to salvage the formulaic piece the song had become.

And this brings me to why this particular disc is somewhat of a disaster. Years after even that second version was recorded, once Rich was playing casinos and nightclubs (and was apparently none too happy about it), he ended up re-recording all of his biggest hits in the style he was playing them at the time, singing his soulful standards like they were just that: Standards, songs that he’s been hired to perform. He does little to take his songs and make them his own, and the saddest thing of all is knowing this was probably not his desire. Singing with a wistful distance from his own music, the whole experience flattens out, robbing the listener of much sense of his range.

However, even with this shortcoming, this album remains enjoyable, because when it came down to it, Rich was a terrific singer with a distinctive voice, who had a great ear for songwriting. Songs like “Rollin’ With The Flow” and “Behind Closed Doors” prop up quaint cliches with an ineffable sincerity that, even on this hi-gloss re-recording, rings true. The album stands as a testament to the talents of one of the most misunderstood artists last century, who, despite continuous mishandling by executives who didn’t know what slot to fit his style into, had one of the best voices around and an ear that knew what to do with it.

Day 23: Alan Jackson – Good Time

“Alan Jackson is pretty well untouchable in Country circles,” a friend told me. I can see why: there’s an apparent craftsmanship to this album that is absolutely assured of its infallibility. Over the course of 17 tracks that pretty much sound the way someone who doesn’t listen to country music would expect country songs to sound, he comes across as someone who knows exactly what he’s doing, and he leaves whether that is a good thing or a bad thing entirely to the listener.

Brandishing cultural references to strike for a connection with the listener can be a risky gambit. It all depends on your audience. For instance, when Vampire Weekend sings “Walk to class / In front of ya / Spilled kefir / On your keffiyeh,” the listener gets to have a personal moment as they inevitably remember having a crush on a girl who wore a keffiyeh everywhere, which probably every man I know has at some point, seeing as how keffiyehs became standard-issue hot chick garb somewhere along the line. Or maybe they never did. Maybe they like chicks who wear wicker cowboy hats and automatically assume that broads who wear those ay-rab scarves are probably stuck up bitches. Maybe you’re like me and hear a song like “Country Boy” and feel like throwing up in your own lap. “Country Boy” is an example of what made it impossible for me to care about anything that was happening to my ears while this album was playing. It, like half the album, consists of rattlin’ off aww-shucks references like:

Bucket seats, soft as baby’s new butt,
Lockin’ hubs, that’ll take you through a deep rut

and later, on “1976”:

Eight track tapes were still in style and Elvis was still alive,
Wonder Woman sure looked fine, Bionic Man was still Prime Time,
And that girl I liked, we kept on tryin till we got it right

A lot of the album continues this way, scattering references to things that people who would like this album would probably appreciate quite a bit. The end result though was that while I was at least able to connect with the things Josh Turner was pining for — as he painted a picture with broader strokes, the kind of pastoral joys (family, love) that all reasonable men want to remember on their deathbeds, I think — Alan Jackson instead dips his pen into such specific wells that it strikes me as someone trying to either prove that they are in touch with the curve (as in “I Still Like Bologna”‘s aww-shucks bemusement with 50 inch plasmas that “seem to reach out and grab ya”) or to easily remind the listener of a time he’d been through, that maybe the listener has been through or maybe the listener wishes he was.

The album, as I said, ends up being pretty mixed. Half of the tracks are nice, straightforward songs about things any red-blooded man ends up thinking about: falling in love; remembering falling in love; trying to not be bored with fucking the girl he fell in love with and married all those years ago, even though he sure does still love her. I think he mentioned his kids in there somewhere, and I’m pretty positive that one of the songs is lamenting the death of a loved one.

The music on this album is actually quite good, but it suffers by association with the lyrics. Jackson has had the same backup band for quite a few years now, and they demonstrate a comfort together. The band is strong on everything from the album’s plenitude of ballads to its chin-jutting bluegrass tunes, and the music manages to apologize for the lyrics quite well most of the time. The album ends up being at its strongest when it lets feeling through, and stops trying to use objects and names as placeholders.

There are plenty such moments where Jackson is universal and relatable, even a complex, likeable man. When he stops trying feebly to paint a word picture, and settles for just telling you about feelings, the album takes off — if only for moments at a time. The album’s high point, for me, ends up being “If You Want to Make Me Happy“: “If you wanna make me happy / Pour me some bourbon on the rocks / And play every sad song on the jukebox.” He actually convinced me that we could sit down to a drink together and have an alright time.

Day 8: Josh Turner – Long Black Train

One of the things that keeps occurring to me in my listening so far is how much I construct my idea of identity — both others’ and my own — around music. It’s actually pretty stupid.

So often in my life I’ve felt like people were separated by what kind of music they listened to. Like, people who listened to rap could not coexist with people who listened to rock and roll. It’s one of those divisions that lives on a totally surface level and makes life more complicated than it needs to be. Luckily, in the capital-i Internet era, musical taste has come to have a lot less to do with geography. People can find things they like in rap, in rock, in jazz, in indie. Indie music itself is like a multicultural gang-bang: people crowding into a room bringing their influences from every corner of the world and cramming them all into one song.

And yet, some genres remain divisive. Country music is a very good example of this. In the hundreds of albums I’ve voraciously absorbed in the last couple of years, I’ve noticed little or no country crossover. Now, depending on what your definition of country is, that statement could be totally wrong. Plenty of modern indie music has called heavily on country’s roots. But rather than synthesize any of the elements to come out of the last couple of decades of country, they skip to the source — the early-1900s recordings, folk music inspired by southern blues.

I’ve met tons of musically-minded people who were eager to proclaim that they appreciate “old country,” arbitrarily naming a few classics like Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn — even though most of them would never just sit down and listen to either of their own volition — in the interest of not seeming close-minded. Most of the people I’ve known who were careful to make this distinction were definitely people that you could imagine being called yankees — younger people obsessed with multiculturalism and New Yorker trend-setting, uncomfortable and insecure about their place in America, eager to cast off anything proudly patriotic as the detritus of an intellectually desiccated culture, still trapped in a bygone civil war dichotomy.

Old country had a real rawness, all battered people mining the depths of their humanity: compare Tammy Wynette to Carrie Underwood and the notion that they’re in the same genre is ludicrous at best. Same for, say, Townes Van Zandt and today’s Josh Turner. Country music took a turn at some point in the last century and stopped being for people in roadhouses who were drinking themselves into a stupor to escape the bleakness of their lives. It became music for the half of the country who doesn’t give a fuck about what people in New York think and suspects California would do our country a lot more good if it did get chipped off the continental shelf. But this whole elitist eye with which people, myself included, look at modern country music is totally and completely wrong, and it’s prejudiced.

Over this last summer in Idaho I spent a lot of time getting in touch with my inner good ol’ boy. Let me tell you, driving through the desertous plains to the east of Boise in a big pickup truck, on our way out to go shootin’, and cranking Tom Petty — well, that was one of those moments for me when all of the affectations and pretensions I seemed to find myself accumulating, all those haughty ideas about art, sloughed off as I found myself perfectly in tune with the redneck mien. Even if it was only trading one affected packaged personality for another one, it was still a relief to be transported to the ‘other side’, to forget for an afternoon about all the existential shit I obsess over on a daily basis. And it was on that afternoon, and on many late nights at dive bars with pop-country filled jukeboxes, where I didn’t care about anything but being with my friends and drinking and having some laughs while we shot pool, that pop country made perfect sense.

Listening to this Josh Turner album a dozen times, I found myself being won over. He has a knack for really beautiful, simple Hallmark songs. Seriously, In My Dreams is one of the most perfectly crafted pop ballads I’ve ever heard. The song is a paean to the beauty of the little things in the artist’s life: settling down with his love, raising a child in a modest house, bringing his wife a glass of water while she pulls weeds in their garden. Taylor’s voice is a rich, sonorous baritone that is passionate and genuine enough to imbue even a song that is, on paper, catastrophically schmaltzy with so much soul that it’s hard not to like. And harder still to ridicule, because to insult it for its blatant artlessness and lack of depth feels petty, and more than that, totally misses the point

This is why I’ll always, if begrudgingly, respect country, even pop country. It is not something alien that was constructed in a laboratory. Oh sure, it may be conniving and manipulative in its ways, as any pop music is, but it is the sound of most of America right now, probably more so than any other extant musical form. And that’s nothing to be ashamed of.

Day 6: Serge Gainsbourg – Histoire de Melody Nelson

Wow, so I got thrown a curve ball here. I had previously enjoyed Serge Gainsbourg on the one thing I’d heard, Comic Strip, which was an innocuous yet staggeringly brilliant piece of pop music that inspired me to dig out my French-English dictionary and which took residence in my head for months afterward. I never listened to anything else of his, and simply forgot about him.

Months ago I got Charlotte Gainsbourg’s IRM and was pretty pleased with it, but it didn’t last for me. A few songs seemed brilliant, and I was flabbergasted to find myself digging on something Beck had been involved in, but on a whole the album felt uneven. For months afterwards I did find myself whistling the string part from Le Chat du Café des Artistes, and I particularly loved the way her breathy singing contrasted with the strong, vibrant strings.

Well, so imagine my surprise when I fired up this album this morning and discovered she was pretty much remaking her dad’s music note for note. Of course, Beck supplied the music for all but one of the songs on IRM, and Beck (post-Sea Change) is one of the artists pointed at as being the most distinctly influenced by Histoire de Melody Nelson; the whole thing is kinda creepy and circular.

The album is, in the standard of its year of birth, 1971, a concept album, about a man hitting a girl on a bicycle with his Rolls Royce and seducing her, having a whirlwind affair with her in luxurious hotels shortly after she turned 15. The music is unbearably sexy: the bass throbs, filling out the whole bottom half of every song, drums tip-toeing over it; in the stratosphere strings sing coldly, swooping into dissonance, and providing a glorious backdrop against which Serge can whisper. His delivery is hushed in a literal sense, insistently mumbling snatches of surreal French poetry. Pillow talk in the truest sense of the phrase, he speaks just loudly enough to be heard over the rustle of blankets and the quiet friction of adjusting arms and legs: “At fifty six, seven, eight, it doesn’t matter / X street, if you knock on the door / First one knock, then three others, they let you in / Alone and sometimes even accompanied.”

The music veers from style to style while always sounding unerringly coherent. The first and last track are quite long and serve to bookend the narrative. The tracks in the middle sum up a whirlwind romance in two-minute quips. The highlight, to me, is Ballade de Melody Nelson. The guitar in its swirling figure alone has more character than most full bands can muster in their combined talents. The plaintive bass punctuates the song, growling up from the turmoil just long enough to remind you how anxious the rest of it is.

Overall, what strikes me at the end of every listen is just how modern this sounds. This would be highly lauded if it came out today. The music is utterly sui generis, defying comparison, let alone categorization — lounge rock and roll? A spiritual predecessor to the storytelling of Nick Cave? Tiller of the soil in which Air, Beck, Portishead, and god knows who else would go on to find fruition?  Whatever words I try to weigh it down with, it responds unfailingly with but one: singular.