Album Club Reviews, Weeks 5-8

Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit, Caro Emerald, We Lost The Sea, Joanna Newsom

Another fortnight, another set of Album Club reviews. Settle in with a cuppa and enjoy some pitch-perfect Americana, anxiety-inducing electro-swing, unexpected temporal warfare, and one of the greatest post-rock albums of all time (just in case you were wondering when this blog would actually cover its namesake genre). Scroll down for the playlists as usual.

Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit - The Nashville Sound

I often default to writing about genre in these reviews and my other music writing - it's become a bit of a crutch and there's only so many times you can re-bake the same ideas. But yeah, Americana huh? I guess it's more relatable than 11/8 Balkan folk to British ears, but I did come into this with some trepidation of country music (not my cup of joe) and of feeling like a tourist in a different musical culture. 

I needn't have worried - singer-songwriter rock ‘n roll is a universal language, whether you're Springsteen, Frank Turner or Shania Twain. Right from the off we get the delightfully lush instrumentation of Last Of My Kind, featuring the first of a few instrumental breaks I could zen out within forever. I found this album rewarded headphone listening over the sound system - the intricate arrangements fill the surround space so well. The alternating country fingerstyle/rocker tracklist is a little rote but helps to keep the momentum better than albums that do heavy/light Side A/B splits. 

I surprised myself this week with some spontaneous singing of Tupelo, Cumberland Gap and, yes, Anxiety. This despite the po-faced lyricism of the latter, in such stark contrast to the cleverness elsewhere on the album that it must be a stylistic choice; but it doesn't really work. The riff bookends feel unnecessary and are distractingly reminiscent of another song that I can't quite remember. White Man's World had me thinking of Michael Kiwanuka's Black Man in a White World as an extreme juxtaposition - one of many minor key rockers here, with excellent duelling violin/guitar solos. Though for my ears the heavier songs are let down by an underwhelming drum mix (this is probably a Me issue, after years of conditioning to overlayed drum samples). 

If We Were Vampires is obviously an amazing track - one of those immaculate constructions for which there is no formula. The haunting reverb in the bridge is so good, reminiscent of Death Cab for Cutie. Ten years earlier and this would have played over the last five minutes of the season finale of every single mid-00s American drama. 

I don't love this album - it's not my thing stylistically, a couple of the songs feel slight, and I'm not about to open a Pandora's Box of country and Americana music. But it is damn good. 8/10

Caro Emerald - Deleted Scenes From The Cutting Room Floor

"Yo Chris," I hear you call out from my living room. "Why don't you put on one of those records of yours for this dinner party?" I immediately break out in a cold sweat, mentally running through all of the unsuitable black metal, post-rock and free jazz records I own, panicking that I have nothing to play that is not heavy, obnoxious, or a challenging listen in some form or another. Maybe an old Rory Gallagher LP would do?

For these situations, I should really get a copy of Deleted Scenes From The Cutting Room Floor. This is a Cool Record for Cool People, suitable both for your chilled listening party and the dancefloor. It's a big assorted grab-bag of pastiches, spiked with the Mark Ronson formula that squares the circle of traditional swing jazz templates with Fatboy Slim big beat to add some lo-fi effects, scratches and drum machines - especially on the likes of That Man and Absolutely Me. You've got samba feel on Riviera Life; the cheesier, flighty jazz of Dr. Wanna Do; and of course the minor key Amy Winehouse templates of The Other Woman and A Night Like This.

Caro Emerald's vocal talent is subtle but undeniable, its range and clarity emerging after repeat listens. It's let down by some overproduction, particularly with the exposed mix on Just One Dance, which grates after a while. My listens varied from breezy surprise at the pacy tempos to impatience at the length of some of the songs - including The Other Woman, whose (excellent) chorus takes far too long to emerge and is only partly redeemed by the sexy James Bond guitar line. The big pre-album singles Back It Up and A Night Like This feel a little more natural in their sound choice - the latter possessing some bite the rest of the album lacks in its clustered chords with large numbers and modifiers written after them.

That being said, these aren't pastiches or sounds that resonate well with me. More than half the songs have the same offbeat drum rhythm, that invokes a (very mild) anxiety response due to its similarity to the Overcooked! video game soundtrack (this is a very specific Me problem). It's definitely versatile, suitable for your guests to enjoy in the background, for a wedding dancefloor, or to have Jools Holland insist on playing along to on his Later... show as the band roll their eyes in patient frustration. Hell, whack the volume up painfully loud through a cracked speaker cone and it'd be perfect for The Elephant's Head in Camden at 2am on a Friday night. Though I think I'll just stay in The Devonshire Arms until closing time. 5/10

We Lost The Sea - Departure Songs

I approached this week with the trepidation of nostalgia on two fronts. Since discovering this particular post-rock gem I have listened to A Lot of music from the genre, and I was worried it might not hold up as well with that knowledge. The weight of projected mythology was the other - my recollection was of this as an album about tragedy inspired by a most personal tragedy, of a band re-inventing itself wholly, boldly, to create the masterpiece of their careers.

If you're a new entrant to post-rock, this album certainly carries most of the tropes - sweeping, cinematic instrumental music led by ethereal clean and crunching distorted guitars; obnoxiously long track lengths that build from quiet to loud; voice samples and crashing cymbals. A Gallant Gentleman is almost your perfect entry point - two or three melodies that escalate to a crescendo, refined and simple in its execution. The best instrumental albums know that, in the absence of a vocal line as your most prominent instrument, they must foreground something to grab your attention through each movement; this is well observed in the mix here, always delivering something new to grab your focus just as you need it through each song.

Where we differ is the context. That big widescreen catharsis sound of post-rock was inspired by the idea of condensing rock music to its rawest form, of delivering emotion purely through music without lyrics. Lots of bands did it and did it well, it got a little bit popular in the early 00s and ended up being your de facto soundtrack to American sports dramas (Explosions In The Sky on Friday Night Lights; This Will Destroy You on Moneyball). Those soundtracks, albums, and bands are all great; but for the casual listener, there's maybe less to hook you into all 12 studio albums from MONO making big Non-Specific Heavy Emotion Guitar Music. Departure Songs dares to be specific, to demand the importance of its context, each song a narrative of specific tragedy and sacrifice, of ascent or descent into the unknowns of the icy tundra, radioactive hell, the depths of the sea, the Final Frontier.

It's a big bet to sell the incorporation of the themes into instrumental music and deflect the idea that this is just window-dressing. I'd say it pays off handsomely. Even before the choir kicks in you can feel the icy winds in the sparse reverb of the guitars of A Gallant Gentleman. The twisty phrase-closing guitar of Bogatyri signals each time an escalation of the insidious threat, twisting minor chords playing over grainy monochrome footage in your head of the fatal Chernobyl clean-up operaton, the pulses and rhythms increasing like a Geiger counter until you're in the realms of full distortion and inevitability. The Last Dive of David Shaw is more specific in its movements, and you can feel the moment the "dive" starts six minutes in.

Challenger Part 1 is the centrepiece and defining moment of the album. It earns every one of the first fifteen minutes of build, from the William S. Burroughs voiceover across walls of feedback to the sparse looping chords for three minutes. The keyboard phrase at the fifteenth minute heralds the disaster ahead, triggering in me every time an autonomic response similar to that of the music sting at the end of an Outer Wilds loop. And how good are the next few minutes - layering more rapid guitars as rocket engine fires, a tense oscillating melody as your first alarm, chaotic tom drums of unease into full alert mode, and the claustrophobic tempo increase into its horrifying conclusion - music doesn't easily move me to tears but this does. Challenger Part 2 follows up with triumphal celebration in memoriam both for the Challenger mission and for all the heroic sacrifices of the album (and one suspects for the band's late singer too) - as good a post-rock moment as the closing of Mogwai’s Mogwai Fear Satan, or The Only Moment We Were Alone from Explosions In The Sky.

I love the ambition and the execution here - including on everything around the album, the artwork, the production. Not everything works - as much as I enjoy Bogatyri, it does descend into a set of post-metal tropes that separate from its narrative, and The Last Dive of David Shaw has something like a 1 in 3 chance of landing for me each time. It's fair to ask if divorced from its context this album could possibly rate as highly. But, of course, context is for kings. 9/10

Joanna Newsom - Divers

The harp is an odd instrument. Obtusely large, grandiose and ornate, inefficient in design or layout compared to a classical guitar, possessed of the bulky inconvenience of a piano without the latter's ubiquity or visual patterning for the learner. I suspect you have to be a bit mad to play one, or to want your kid to play one. (Can you even get a loaner harp from your local music authority? Where exactly does it fit into the warbling middle-school orchestra rendition of the Pink Panther theme tune? Will that bank loan need to cover a bigger car as well as premium lesson rates?) All of which is to say, nicely and with respect, I'd be unsurprised if harp players conceptualise the world a little differently, and embrace challenge more readily.

Divers is a Challenging Record. Certainly for my listening oeuvre, which is far removed from a lot of the influences here, many of which I couldn't name. (Harpsichord-core? ...Harpsicore? I'll see myself out.) There are smatterings of familiarity here, used in interesting ways - the American country guitar slides on Goose Eggs, a trad-folk feel to Same Old Man (albeit with some Minimoog thrown underneath); Waltz of The 101st Lightborne pings my mental model of what I think Marillion songs I used to skip on my MP3 player sounded like (they probably don't). But the whole thing passed me by on a first passive listen as arch, inaccessible, unclear of purpose. I can understand how Joanna Newsom's voice can be a barrier to entry - it's certainly an acquired taste, though I found myself questioning why I was having more difficulty with this than, say, the similar affectations of black midi's Geordie Greep, or all of black metal. The instrumentation and writing too - for most music we've had on Album Club I think I can conceptualise how the creative process may have worked to construct the songs. I have genuinely no idea how you construct something like Anecdotes or Sapokanikan - maybe it's the harp-brain thing, a radically different approach to the use of percussion, or maybe it's a skill issue on my part.

The latter is likely - persistent listening revealed the intelligence of this album, musically and lyrically - however, it requires an undivided focus, and the lyrics to hand. That whole verse on Waltz of the 101st Lightborne that detachedly introduces the idea of temporal war? Great, but blink and you'll miss it. So too the "loneliness of geese" line on Goose Eggs, and the intense sophisticated builds of You Will Not Take My Heart Alive resolving to the mournful simplicity of the repeated title lyric. There's some thrilling syncopation on Leaving The City, which finally introduces a drumbeat worthy of the name, although it's undercut by what sounds like the Overdrive Guitar patch on a cheap Casio keyboard - such an odd sonic choice. Newsom's voice has grown on me to a point of mild fascination - there are points in The Things I Say where I genuinely cannot tell if there's a high-pass filter being applied in a targeted fashion, or if that's an innate vocal modulation? It's impressive either way.

The best complex, progressive records are more than just technical exercises - and Divers successfully layers in emotional heft. The title track may be the longest song on the record, but the beauty of its shifting chorus refrain and relative simplicity ensures it never drags. We get lyrical callbacks and allusions, running themes of memory, time, love, military structures and camaraderie - I'm vaguely reminded of El-Mohtar and Gladstone's This Is How You Lose The Time War, and not just for the obvious reason. The second half of the record reduces the instrumental experimentation and song lengths, occasionally feeling a bit slight, though this may be fatigue. The whole thing builds to Time, As A Symptom - possibly the best song on the record, tying all the threads together into a full orchestral arrangement (albeit surprisingly brief - the Prague Philharmonic must charge by the hour). Add in the layered vocals and drums and it becomes quite the thing.

Three listens is probably not enough. There comes a time with big complex art where you need to decide how long to keep with it, how much more you're likely to gain for the effort, or if you will finally accept persistence to be a fool's errand and reclaim your nice bookmark from the 600th page of Infinite Jest. I suspect Divers is a fantastic record with much more to uncover, and perhaps if I had some closer musical reference points that I regularly enjoyed, or even a basic appreciation for poetry, I would have more patience for it. As it is, I may have to concede respectful defeat, at least for now, but with satisfaction that there was plenty to enjoy on the way. 6/10

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(Joanna Newsom is not on Spotify. Find it on YouTube or get on TIDAL!)