Robert Johnson’s shadow falls on everyone in music that seeks authenticity. Those 31 songs, so mythologized by artists all around the Western world, crop up time and again in the way of references both stated and implicit. Even those who don’t acknowledge, or are simply unaware, of Johnson’s legacy will likely feel an echo of it in some way during their career, whether by the choice of a producer or by a lengthy comparison written by some critic.
I’d argue that Johnson’s music had three major effects on music: it helped create the blues craze in England, which provided the counter-point to the Motown and vocal jazz influence expressed in the music of The Beatles and The Kinks, among others; it helped develop the model for musical authenticity, as I alluded to above; and it taught musicians and producers that music didn’t have to sound “good” to be popular or influential. The first point isn’t strictly relevant to this post, nor is the second, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment, but the third is extremely important.
Authenticity and lo-fidelity are often bundled together, but I want to tweeze them apart for the purposes of this write-up, partially because I’m assuming you’re all sick of hearing me talk about the former. The connection between the two is simple, and one I’ve talked about before: older, “authentic” music was poorly recorded due to the poverty of the artists and the poor technology available to them. The two were tied together by coincidence rather than explicit choice. There’s plenty of brilliant blues and folk from the 50s that sounds comparable to music from decades later, so it’s hard to say that artists like Robert Johnson were poorly recorded for some artistic, “authentic” reason.
Nevertheless, and to the detriment of many artists, lo-fidelity is now tied to the romantic ideal of classic artists and their so-much-purer music. Technology has been bent to the goal of introducing static to the pristine environment of modern recordings. You might think that I enjoy that kind of thing, considering my all-consuming hatred of “perfected” music, but I see the two trends as practically the same thing. Both the lo-fi and perfect-fi movements are about distorting the music made by the recorded artist in order to achieve some ideal.
While bubblegum pop seeks to eliminate humanity to achieve a perfect product, lo-fi music seems almost to work at harming itself. It’s music at its most masochistic, cutting itself to achieve the effect seen on old vinyl records of audible distortion and age. Perhaps it’s down to my own weakness of memory, but I find nothing romantic or admirable in time’s power to erase details. To me, this modern day movement of false age and gravity resembles nothing more than pointless self-destruction.
Such efforts are particularly incongruous and distracting on Shallow Grave, and, indeed, the rest of The Tallest Man On Earth’s impressive catalog. Though the album is frequently evocative of Dylan’s early acoustic albums (particularly the aggressively minimalist The Times They Are A-Changin’), it also sounds less polished and produced than that early-60s counterpart. This choice is baffling, especially when the opening track is quite lush in its guitar sound and has barely any of the audible recording hiss present on the rest of the album. “Where Do My Bluebirds Fly”, a highlight in terms of songwriting, is particularly poorly recorded.
Don’t worry, I’m not turning this blog into a soapbox of negativity and bitching quite yet; I do really enjoy this album and that’s why I’m discussing it. If anything, I started things off this way to get all of my complaints about the album’s production out of the way, as it’s the only truly negative thing I have to say about it.
The music itself is extremely strong. In all honesty, the comparisons to Dylan I hear so often about Kristian Matsson are undeserved and misleading; the two artists have radically different strengths. Though both artists have slightly off-putting, nasally delivery in their singing, Matsson is a more competent vocalist with a wider, though still limited range. Similarly, his guitar-playing is far superior, and we’re spared the interminable harmonica solos that clog some of those early Dylan albums. This all contributes to the music being much more “folksy” than Dylan’s music which, to me at least, often resembled blues music more than anything else.
Flipping things around, the one area in which this comparison serves to diminish Matsson is in lyrics. Comparing any lyricist to Dylan is often a stealth insult for music critics (except when I do it, honest; I legitimately believe Cohen, Marling, and Darnielle are, at the least, Dylan’s peers when it comes to lyrics) simply because so few people truly do measure up to that classic legacy (including Dylan himself, often). This is certainly the case with The Tallest Man; these lyrics rarely even make sense, resembling only Dylan’s most surreal, often self-mocking songs.
It’s a false contrast though; Dylan (and Cohen, for that matter) wrote songs with a focus on the lyrics, while Matsson is better described as focusing on sheer music. There are words, yes, but they’re not there to analyze and pick apart, nor are they there to be focused in on. The production reinforces this, with Matsson’s guitar often overwhelming his voice, which is already audibly strained in many of these songs.
Lyrics like these often annoy me, simply because they can often veer a bit into the cheerful absurdity that marks the worst Paul McCartney songs. That whole twee side of the music world is something I can rarely abide, with the cheerful, back-of-the-playground feel of Andrew Bird or Jason Mraz songs often causing the creeping horrors for me. Maybe it’s just because I always hated camps but that false bonhomie rings as just that: false.
So why doesn’t it bother me here? As loath as I am to admit it, considering my furious little diatribe above, it may well be the production style. That lo-fi sound does achieve the aim I hypothesized with this album, namely the sense of gravity and age that is shrugged at by most twee artists. Matsson shares the absurdity but not the naïveté of those artists.
Even as I say that, a cursory look over the lyrics for this album reveals that at least some of them have a semblance of meaning. “I Won’t Be Found” and “Into The Stream” both trade in extremist, apocalyptic sounding lyrics that are very bluesy in their high-handed style (“Deep in the dust forgot and gathered/I'll grow a diamond in my chest./I make reflections as the moon shine/Turn to a villain as I rest” from the former and “I've set the rain to be cold and hard/I've set the sun to be bright and sharp/To wake you up from your hollow dream/I'll shake your bed with a thunder strike/From my hand” from the latter, for example). This kind of powerful language will also likely be familiar to fans of metal, both classic and modern; both share roots in blues music, so this isn’t terribly surprising.
In comparison, “Shallow Grave” and “The Gardener” are a bit more impenetrable, but remain recognizably personal. There’s some meaning being hinted there, even if it isn’t particularly obvious; the latter seems to be the stylized bragging of a consummate liar, but I don’t really have a clue for the former. What do they share in common are exaggerated lyrics (“I know the runner's going to tell you /There ain't no cowboy in my hat/So now he's buried by the daisies/So I could stay the tallest man in your eyes, babe” from “The Gardener”) and a generally poetic style.
That poetic style is shared on the rest of the album, but the lyrics don’t appear to be exaggeration so much as products of word association tests. That isn’t really a slam, mind you; they may not by favorite pieces, but even the most obscured lyrics (“Honey Won’t You Let Me In” is a prime example) do convey a mood, at least. As I’ve discussed before, that’s ultimately all you need to have a song fully congeal: a consistent mood. More can be lovely, but it’s not strictly necessary.
Considering the less-is-more primitivism of this album, and the rest of The Tallest Man’s work, that kind of restraint from reaching for an allegorical point is quite consistent. There’s nothing even remotely political in these songs (at least, not as far as I can hear), which puts Matsson more in line with the psychedelic and blues rooted music of the 70s than with Dylan’s folk music period, which, even when it wasn’t directly political, was certainly rife with angry dismissals. The only emotion I can fully get from these songs is loneliness, or maybe some kind of yearning, which is, again, very blues.
In terms of sound, Shallow Grave is very much a folk or country album, but with some focus it seems more like shell-shocked blues music. Even when delivering bombastic boasts like the ones I’ve quoted above, Matsson’s voice never seems particularly powerful. I hate to say it, but the Robert Johnson sound of the album may actually enhance this feeling. It certainly works better here than it does elsewhere. In keeping with the album’s title, The Tallest Man On Earth sounds recently deceased, singing from the ground as loud as he can through a veil of dirt and wood.
Cheers everyone.
PS: Feel free to steal that last simile for your review of the next album, Pitchfork.
No comments:
Post a Comment