Kisses in the Pouring Rain

Silhouette of Sirens is Chastity Brown's first album in five years. It has ten songs and it plays front to back in less than an hour and, listening today, it's hard not to think about time. Hard not to think about what happens in five years. Front to back, there is time for a lot of life to unfold. Wherever we've found ourselves, it's hard not to think, in the end, "I / don't wanna be lost, don't wanna be lost, don't wanna be lost."

At the beginning of the month, Chastity described Silhouette of Sirens as "the most vulnerable work I have created thus far." By that measure, this record supplants her second album, Sankofa--a sparser, rawer recording that she described at the time as, "the most difficult writing experience I've ever had." The title referenced an African proverb about the value of returning for those things you've forgotten; for Chastity, that meant nightmares from the work of dredging up notes to narrate her sexual abuse. When the record came out, she said, "I completely laid that out and I never want to sing that again, but it was all me."

If Sankofa wrestled with pain endured in the past, Sirens wrestles with the pain we encounter day to day. These encounters are subtle, fraught, expansive, and in some moments wholly joyful. They comprise the pain that all of us endure simply by living in the present, and they smolder long after present is past. I will not pretend to know what "My Stone" is about, specifically, except to say that I've been there, too. And none of us want to be lost. Especially not "from you." Especially not after we "consider the cost." Front to back, all of us have ached the way Chastity's voice does.

Five years ago it was important to define this familiarity. Reviewing Chastity Brown meant talking about how she defied genre--how she had forged a new kind of "Americana-Soul", or invigorated gospel-rock, or renounced all of the above. We were fixated on the label. The fact that she'd been named City Pages' Best Folk Artist only intensified our fixation. What kinds of songs are these? And who do they belong to? Chastity took to addressing the dilemma from from the stage. One summer night at Mill City Ruins, she announced--not for the first time and not for the last--"I am a folk singer!" Her songs were proletariat songs, she said. Like Woody Guthrie. "And I'm glad to play for y'all tonight." Then she drove her band straight down a gospel-blues tempest that would have caught Dylan blushing at Newport.

That show was on August 28th, 2013, in the ruins of the Washburn A Mill. It was the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. Chastity had spent the year playing shows all over Minnesota in support of her last album, Back-Road Highways, and as a vocal advocate for marriage equality, which had become law just three months earlier. These kinds of details offered a tempting narrative for those of us writing from the comfort of sundry cis-white-male outposts in South Minneapolis. Chastity Brown will lead the way and set you free! (Dancing to "After You" did little to discourage this impression.)

Chastity previewed her Sirens release last year, telling Heather McEntire, "there's stories to tell other than just the specifics of politics or my certain stances on things." After so much campaigning, it could sound like a betrayal. Of Woody Guthrie, no less! Of folk music itself! Except that the "folk music" epithet has a long served as a convenient excuse for not actually listening to non-white singers. Alynda Sergarra of Hurray for the Riff Raff recently described how isolating the label can be:

When people of color are "allowed" into the world of modern folk music we are held up as spokespeople. We are thought to be special, unlike the voiceless others of our background...

Her diagnosis?

People who experience oppression are not voiceless; their voices are simply not being heard...What does it mean when we ignore people and then label them "voiceless?" What does it do to our collective psyche? I believe it conditions us not to listen to them. 

Chastity Brown insists that we listen to all of the voices her songs embrace. 

My first goal in playing music was to feel like I was part of something. The style of music that I play has the tradition of being integrated with the surrounding community. When I first started playing music in Knoxville, Tennessee, one of my mentors told me that before I took off to "tour the world" I would have to first give the music to my neighborhood which, for him, meant everything from funerals to weddings to front porch jam sessions to fundraisers. 

Chastity's vocals on Sirens are part of this kind of community ensemble. Her songs unfold the way life does, taking time to share the moment's pain on friendly front porches. DeVon Gray's spacious orchestration on "My Stone" leaves time for a bass line to scuttle out from underneath honeyed strings and the chirping flutters from eager flutes. Somewhere between resilience and melancholy, flutes and strings, Chastity Brown insists that we cannot leave her on her own. There must be time for her full story. One summer night...

I came home after the mass demonstration that we did for Jamar Clark through the streets of Minneapolis and wrote this song called "Hey You." It's very gentle. Initially, the song was more like, "Fuck you." [Chuckles] But what I realized was that that changed the focus. If I'm saying, "Fuck you," that means I'm on such high guard that I'm also not celebrating. Alice Walker says, "Where there are tears, there will be dancing." 

Insisting on both is what keeps us from being lost; that is what makes it a political act. Each of us needs those moments where time falls away and we are left to celebrate whatever pain has brought us here. On "Pouring Rain", Chastity's voice charges out ahead of her band, exposed and pleading, "I only wanted you to miss me!" Her pain is so familiar that it is not quite catharsis when she insists that time fall away for a stranger we've all known to "kiss me standing in the pouring rain!" Our ache is still present, but the rain hides our tears. Right now, front to back, all of us are dancing.

Album Review: Jason Isbell - Something More Than Free

As Jason Isbell began belting the first verse of Cover Me Up just several songs into an opening set for Todd Snider at The Barrymore Theater in Madison, WI in the spring of 2013, I sunk several inches in my chair and began wiping water from my eyes, unable to ignore the revelatory nature of the moment.  The poignant and graceful songwriting on Southeastern about recovery, redemption, and the human condition deeply connected with listeners like few records in recent memory.  Southeastern went on to garner Isbell critical acclaim, a larger fan base, and serious accolades in the music industry.  Jason Isbell had arrived as an adult voice, leaving behind the days of youthful indulgence and rock and roll escapism. 

On Isbell’s new record, Something More than Free, we find our hero “hell-bent on growing up”, settling into adulthood, with no delusions of how difficult the road ahead lies.  On the opening If It Takes a Lifetime, Isbell deliberately reminds us that the struggle is ongoing.  The narrator defines a man “as a product of / all the people that he ever loved,” highlighting that the true measure of a man is how he can face adulthood head on, provide best for those closest around him, and live satisfied with that.    The familiar themes of fate, growing up, personal compromise, and sacrifice that fill Isbell’s past work take on a heightened, prominent role this time around.

The lynch-pin of the record, Children of Children, showcases these themes front and center and ranks among the best songs in Isbell has ever wrote.  Based on the experience of his own mother, Isbell slays listeners with his portrait of a young woman grappling with the struggles of growing up and sacrificing her own desires in order to raise a child.  The song builds to a climax-filled guitar solo as fierce and powerful as any piece of music we are likely to hear this year.  Children of Children suggests Jason Isbell may be the closest artist this generation has to a Neil Young.  

Like Isbell’s own story, Something More Than Free provides us with a roadmap of how to stare down regret and grow into adulthood with dignity and grace.  The down and out castaways in songs like Streetlights and Alabama Pines that permeate Isbell’s back catalog have given way to a set of older protagonists mulling regret for newfound wisdom.  The songs 24 Frames, Flagship, How to Forget, and The Life You Chose, all offer up reflections of the past and sermons for the future.  Even the songs Palmetto Rose and To the Band that I Loved, which may seem like thematic outliers on the record, harken to the past to look to the future. 

In Something More Than Free, Jason Isbell shows us that he is not only a musical artist but a professional craftsman of songwriting in the highest degree.  Isbell’s focus on human relationships and the compromises we must make in order to find happiness as we age, mirrors the struggle many of us must go through.  In an era where singles continue to dominate the musical landscape out of Nashville, Isbell seems hell-bent on putting out albums that stand up to the standards of another era and carrying the flag as one of the greatest songwriters of our time.  

-w.u.

Album Review: Courtney Barnett - Sometimes I Sit and Think & Sometimes I Just Sit

Good God. Me too, Courtney. Me too. 

Courtney Barnett opens her debut full length with the urgent and immediately shared worry over Oliver Paul's thick head of hair and the probability of its eventual baldness, and also how "he's dropping soy linseed vegemite crumbs everywhere." He is our champion before he's finished his breakfast. When the time comes - and it comes sooner than we expect - we tear our ties from our necks and we raise them with Oliver, singing "I'm not going to work today/gonna count the minutes that the trains run late!" (Because, shit, every dream's a good dream, right John Darnielle?) 

That first song ends on a rooftop, our hero imagining street life as Sim City and otherwise gaining perception and clarity when the second track interrupts, blistering with guitars and the album's best fist-chant warning about places like rooftops: "Put me on a pedestal and I'll only disappoint you!" Courtney Barnett has a talent for bending and stretching and screaming and ignoring a phrase all at the same time. Like she's daring us to be disappointed. One track later it's same dare, but lonelier, hung through with the probing-sluggish way we talk when we lay awake at three, blinking at minutiae. We're thinking of you too. 

***

That dare is what makes "DePreston" so immediate; such arresting first impression/depression. Suddenly we're ensconced in the minutiae of house-hunting with a too-specific financial discussion obscuring the fact it wasn't our idea to look out further. That percolator is saving us $23 a week. Oliver Paul probably worries about the same things when he steps down from the roof. We retreat to brass tacks:

CB: And it's going pretty cheap you say?

RE Agent: Well it's a deceased est-ay-ay-ate.

RE Agent: Aren't the pressed metal ceilings great?

"Deceased est-ay-ay-ayte" is the only line Courtney Barnett arches on the entire album. It sounds like an eye-roll, at least in part because who gives a shit about pressed metal ceilings? People lived here with a handrail in the shower and old kitchenwares "and a photo of a young man in a van in Vietnam." And it's so stupid but it's hard not to wonder something about who they were and how they lived and with what beyond that handrail for support. "I wonder what she bought it for?" It's not the thing we want to ask; it's the thing we know how to ask. Inquiry and Oliver, idling insignificantly.

Guitars spread across the landscape and then they look out further. There is life in this home that we are poorly equipped to discover. Maybe there is too much of it. 

If you've got a 

spare half a million 

you could knock it down and start rebuilding.

Speech, Sly & Jah: Fishin' 4 Religion with Arrested Development

The DJ's final song before D'Angelo and ?uestlove hit the stage at First Avenue last June was "People Everyday" from Arrested Development's 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days In the Life Of..., an album that had the misfortune of being groundbreaking two months after The Chronic was groundbreaking. Greg turned around and raised a toast to the first CD he'd ever purchased. It was one of my first CD purchases, too, and it's one of basically two hip-hop albums I can remember loving before I got to college. Jurassic 5 was the other one. Both are throwback albums, with 3 Years... owing its heaviest debt to Stand, the magnificent Sly & the Family Stone album from 1969. This is where "People Everyday" was first recorded as the soul standard now recognizable as a Toyota jingle. The harmonica-driven beats on "Mama's Always on Stage" are also a kind of backyard BBQ approximation of Sly's blues on "I Want to Take You Higher." 

The more important similarity is the democracy of voices that both Sly and AD frontman, Speech, manage to balance. Rhythm sections, horns, bass and vocals share the spotlight and borrow language from one another. Arrested Development introduce a conversational style that blends gospel, blues, hip-hop and reggae. The instantly recognizable scat opening on "People Everyday" greets Caribbean-toms and builds over the course of the album to a call and response between, horns, backup vocalists and "the ghost of childhood." Singing along as a 12-year old in suburban Connecticut, this album was my introduction to the idea that there were a lot of American stories I hadn't heard.

A few of you have probably seen the dude who stands outside First Ave in the winter asking for exiting concert goers to sign his coat and spare a dollar or two. The other night he was outside Tracy's on Franklin asking for signatures and a favorite song on his t-shirt. (And a dollar or two.) And I thought, hey, I know this guy! I've got a dollar! I said hello and signed his shirt. We did not exchange knowledge for shoes, but we did smile about Sam Cooke. ("You have put a maestro on my shirt!") I walked away thinking "to give him money isn't charity." Critics dismiss this as naive, self-satisfied personal politics, and they have a point. Nothing here is as biting as Sly's "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey." Mr. Wendal is a friend with new shoes! We are not exactly fucking the police. I memorized the song from KISS 95-POINT-7's nightly Top 7 at 7. 

For all of the white teenagers who probably did the same thing, politically we were not exactly the intended audience. Speech's lyrics sound a clear call for African unity, and the music itself sounds an even more specific call for black communities to resolve a tension that emerged from the successes of the civil rights movement. The experience of discrimination in America's northern states challenged the notion that a slave could find liberation in the West. Craig Werner explains, "the symbolic West - the place of exile - and the symbolic South - the place of slavery - are the same place. What's different is the self-understanding of the black people living there. Are you an exile or are you a slave?"

This was Jamaican Reggae's specific response to the gospel ascensions of Curtis Mayfield's and Marvin Gaye's American Soul. Per Werner, "the centrality of Africa in reggae was the primary difference between the soul music of the sixties and seventies and the reggae of the same period. As long as black Americans and black Jamaicans focused on the hardships of daily life, the visions ran close together." But politically and spiritually their paths to redemption pointed in different directions. American Soul sang the slave's journey north to freedom. Jamaican Reggae sang the exile's journey home.   

These are the spiritual politics of AD's "People Everyday", a reggae-rap rewrite of one of the most famous and most idealistic songs in American Soul. Speech explicitly brings the divergent voices into conversation. Answering Sly's familiar chorus he lays out the choice facing everyday people everyday:

that's the story y'all, of a black man

acting like a nigga and get stomped by an African

This choice, not the choice to spare $2, is the one also at the heart of "Mr. Wendal." Mr. Wendal is only a bum by the terms of a quick-to-diss society. Even in the North he is a no-one, though he remains a "human by flesh." He enjoys a spiritual "freedom that you and I think is dumb" only by enduring the physical conditions of exile. For Speech, to know Mr. Wendal is to know his own history. This is why giving money isn't charity. They belong to a united African diaspora.

On "Tennessee" Speech considers the alternative. He asks the Lord to direct him home but on his ensuing journey south he only breaks "outta the country and into more country." He finds roots only in the trees his forefathers hung from, growing in shallow soil next to watermelons viney with memory. Speech tells the Lord: "I am still thirsty." Dionne Farris closes the song with a haunting gospel moan that adopts the exile's freedom cry, "won't you please take me home?" She cannot mean North and she cannot mean South. "Take me to another place. Take me to another land." Middle schoolers in West Hartford only sang along. 

A conversation between soul and reggae in the early-90s may have been naive. In hindsight it seems especially egregious for AD to have been so eagerly dismissive of the harder gangsta-blues that resonated with many black Americans. What is naive, however, was also empowering, especially to white suburban adolescents and other people who haven't been explicitly disempowered. Hearing how simple things - like buying shoes or staying calm or simply listening - can make an important difference in another person's life is a powerful message at twelve, when nothing you do seems to really matter. Plus Speech was a "fashion misfit" -- just like me! His politics begin as the politics of careful listening. His music is a celebration of human complexity. 3 Years... is the after-church sound of backyard introductions, children and conversation. Anyone buying Mr. Wendal a pair of shoes starts by asking for his size. 

  

Don't Stop The Carnival: Happy Birthday, Harry Belafonte!

Today is Harry Belafonte's 86th birthday. I strongly encourage you to begin any celebrating you undertake this weekend by toasting the living legend and watching his 1997 performance of "Matilda."

***

Belafonte's 1956 album, Calypso, was the first US LP to sell more than 1 million copies in a year. His recording of the "The Banana Boat Song (Day-O)" made the Jamaican folk song so famous that in 1993 Al Bundy could sing an extended parody on Married With Children. His (Belafonte's, not Bundy's) beautiful "Jamaica Farewell" forces even the most hearty Minnesotan to wonder why he shouldn't move someplace where "the rum is fine any time of year." That wedding where you tripped trying to lead a conga line and everyone dominoed behind you and the bride's parents quietly asked you to leave? You were probably dancing to Harry Belafonte.

He was friends with Martin Luther King. And John F. Kennedy. And Bobby Kennedy. In 1961 Belafonte helped to convince JFK that he should provide airlifts for a group of Kenyan students and issue them visas to study in the United States. "[O]n one of those planes, we had Barack Obama's father." Two weeks ago he was given the NAACP's highest honor, the Spingarn Medal, and he delivered this amazing speech.

***

Harry Belafonte's 1959 recording, Live at Carnegie Hall, was the first commercially successful live album, which means that the double vinyl LP is easy to find and cheap. (I bought my copy for fifty-cents.) The CD format cut four songs and all of Belafonte's stage banter so that the recording would not spill onto a second disc. Both formats include his performance of "The Marching Saints", but only the LP includes his 90-second introduction to the song.

It is a choreographed introduction. Belafonte wonders to his audience, what would "When The Saints Go Marching In" sound like if the gospel hymn popularized by Louis Armstrong had instead grown out of the English madrigal tradition? Then, at Carnegie Hall in 1959, Belafonte adopts a wonderfully haughty, over-enunciated British accent and sings the first verse as if he were a prim Episcopalian warming up for choir rehearsal. "Tra-la-la-la-la-la-la" follows each phrase and he closes to laughter and applause -- "Good show, good show!" His voice then subtly hardens as he addresses an audience not actually so different from the one he has just satirized.

But it wasn't meant to be a madrigal; it was meant to be exactly what it was. An historical opportunity for a group of Negro musicians down in New Orleans to play and to celebrate on some festive occasion. And at the time that this song came about, what could have been more festive during that period than a funeral?

***

Fifty-four years later, Harry Belafonte deserves a rum and Coca-Cola and a festive Friday for his 86th birthday. Don't stop the carnival!

(BONUS: Here's Belafonte performing a 14-minute "Matilda" and showcasing his Swedish language talents in 1966!)

The Age of Nothing, The Age of Dawn: Free Energy's Love Sign

Two years ago on Valentine's Day my wife found me cavorting with a new pair of speakers. "Those are much bigger than you described," she complained. (Accurately.) "Is this Free Energy?"

"Um. Yes." I calmly replied.

***

That was 2011, which meant that Free Energy's 2010 debut, Stuck on Nothing, was in steady rotation around our apartment. We'd been excited about them since we'd heard the band's earlier incarnation, Hockey Night, doing "For Guys Eyes Only." We had "Dream City" on our 2009 summer mix. We loved the shimmering leaps from one carefree guitar hook to the next. We loved that it was so easy to sing along. Two years ago Stuck on Nothing was road trip music, grilling music and even dinner music. It was the year we went to Mexico.

("Bang Pop")

***

Hearing Free Energy for the first time was like hearing Boston for the first time: crammed in the back of my friend's van, fake-snorting pixie stix and returning from a Boy Scout camping trip with his dad behind the wheel. It was the first time I'd heard guitars that sounded like lasers! And those diamond-tipped vocals! It sounded like Aerosmith, only waxed and polished. We got home and I immediately raced out to buy Don't Look Back and Third Stage. The latter was released in 1986. It was the first album to be certified gold in both CD and LP formats. 

"On Third Stage," I bragged to fascinated friends, "Tom Scholz didn't use any synthesizers! He spent six years using real guitars to make synthesizer sounds!"

"Why didn't he just use synths? They chorused.

"HOLLYANN!" I calmly replied.

It was around this phase of my life that I sat down for lunch one day and ate ten spoonfuls of yogurt without realizing that it was actually raw pancake batter.

("Feelin' Satisfied")

***

Free Energy's second album, Love Sign, is out this year in time for Valentine's Day. My wife and I share our speakers now with a cat. The founding equities of this transaction had been well balanced: a great deal on great speakers = one (1) cat one (1) year later. Only then we ended up with a cat whose favorite album is On The Corner by Miles Davis. So while the speakers have been great, the cat is a young Jordan.

One area in which our speakers consistently outperform the young Jordan is sound quality. Another is volume. One album that is well served by each of these performances is Love Sign, by Free Energy. Sometimes we crank "Backscratcher" and watch the young Jordan dunk from the free throw line.

***

Back in college the cross-country team would wake up at nine on Sunday mornings to shuffle through whatever stupor Saturday had sent. After we ran we drank some fucking coffee and cooked some fucking pancakes. We had eggs, too, and probably bacon and whatever it was that Hooley was eating back in those days and Biz had these hemp seeds that he ground with the coffee because that's what Jack down at Stadium said to do...

There were two songs; two live recordings: Bruce Springsteen's "Cadillac Ranch", promising sure salvation just over yonder state line...

Hey there little girlie in those blue jeans so tight

Drivin' alone through that 

Wisconsin night!

...and Bob Dylan's "Shelter from the Storm", performed as if not only was there shelter, it had a liquor cabinet!

Suddenly I turned around and she was standin' there!

In that kitchen the role of pancake flipper was nearly as respected as the role of air guitarist.

***

Last weekend I put Love Sign on the Valentine's Day speakers. I wanted to hear it in the kitchen from the living room. It had started to snow and it was a good morning for some fucking pancakes. "Electric Fever" came on and I thought, oh cool, this has that faster-Creedence groove from 'Cool The Engines'! "Girls Want Rock" came on and I thought, oh cool, this sounds like 'Bang Pop'! The young Jordan dunked from the free throw line.

("Electric Fever")

***

Pitchfork had a different reaction:

[F]or all of the "That 70s Band" affectations that accompanied their occasionally charming and novel 2010 debut Stuck On Nothing, most of Love Sign is actually slick, subcompact power-pop that traces its lineage from the Cars (without the jittery, new wave idiosyncrasies) to Blue Album Weezer (without the emotional reckoning) to Jimmy Eat World (without the generous heart), and unfortunately, back to latter day Weezer in how it aggressively cops to its own formulism as a preemptive strike against critique.

The pancakes that morning were a modified recipe. I'd halved it, and also we were out of baking powder. "Hey Tonight" came on and I substituted butter. 

If so much of Free Energy's praise thus far has taken to the theoretical-- you could totally hear it coming out of an airbrushed van! These could all be hits in 1975!-- it's because none of it feels inspired by anything resembling a real human interaction.

We were out of milk, too. "Hold You Close" came on and I substituted coffee.

Sloan had the encyclopedic knowledge and chops to serve as satisfying meta exercise and compete with the power-pop originals, the Darkness juxtaposed the groupie-slaying connotations of their music with incredibly nerdy puns about STDs, masturbation, and RPGs, Junior Senior traded in subversive and very non-subversive sexual politics, Andrew WK didn't make a record so much as a code of ethics.

My friend's friend does this thing where she'll take a pad of butter and hide it in every few pancakes. She just sets it on top as the pancake surface bubbles. The pancake soaks it up. She calls it the "butter surprise."

And do they ever love those groovy girls who just want to dance all night. That last part is important: seemingly every other song makes some sort of reference to dancing or shaking it all night, but only one is actually called "Dance All Night".

This is true. On Love Sign, Free Energy make no fewer than 15 solicitations for listeners to dance all night. (I'm guessing.) Love Sign thus finds Free Energy offering clear signage for love. Teachers praise this technique as "giving explicit instructions." A corollary principle is called "setting expectations." Good teachers use these strategies to invert a student's prejudices: wait a minute, why aren't you dancing?"

(Backscratcher Live)

***

Pitchfork's Love Sign reviewer also cites his frustration that "a lyric about 'making out with your lip stick gloss' is as close as you get to second base." The full lyric is actually, "Well I feel so boss/making out with your lip stick gloss." Free Energy live in a post-Samberg world. "Boss" belongs to the memes, and the narrow emotional reckoning its rhyme offsets is both deliberate and familiar. Those who worry over the album's lacking in "anything resembling a real human interaction" only beg the question: how recently did this person last experience a real human interaction? 

***

Without any baking powder last weekend the pancakes turned out a little bit soggy. But they also tasted like buttery coffee, and after I doused them in syrup they weren't actually that much soggier than normal. I tend to be generous with my syrup. 

***

Love Sign is eponymous of the Prince song. The eighth track, "Street Survivor", is eponymous of the Skynyrd album. It is the fact of Love Sign's deliberateness that makes it human -- the fact of its own deliberate appeal to human listeners for real human interaction. It delivers exactly as much as we can share and remember. It is an album that invites air guitars and improvised recipes. Play it on Valentine's Day speakers and dance all night. 

("Free Energy" Live)

Neil Young - On The Beach

Start with this: I am a complete sucker for Neil Young’s guitar work. Depending on what iteration of him you’re listening to, his guitar style migrates from folk- and country-tinged songs to stretched-out electric guitar workouts to distortion-laden noise-making. I eat up pretty much all of it, but I’m especially partial to his electric stuff, in particular the early-to-mid 70s Crazy Horse guitar jams. The best of them morph a melody, building a sense of momentum while pounding that melody into the ground in an absolutely relentless fashion. There’s a groove to the guitar work, and it’s often melodic. But it’s also rough; guitars bleat and wail, with piercing high notes held to glorious effect. For me, the combination can be euphoric, and Neil Young is one a few musicians that can hit that sweet spot.

In that sense, On the Beach is a somewhat strange album for me to choose.* Crazy Horse is nowhere to be seen, and there are no long electric guitar jams. The album followed the death of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten, who died of a heroin overdose the night Young kicked him out of the band (for the second time) because he couldn’t stay sober enough to perform. Young felt guilt over his death, and after recording Tonight’s the Night – a drunken, sloppy album that his record company initially rejected – he returned with On the Beach.

What it does do better than any other Neil Young album, for me, is blend all of the various stylistic touch-points that he pulls into his music. Over Neil’s catalog, he’ll grab a sound – country or dissonant rock or folk or blues or electronic music or Americana –and construct an album that bores into that sound. On the Beach is ostensibly a blues album, but more than any other release of his, it takes all of those genres and blends them, like how an egg white treats flavors in a cocktail, creating complexity by mixing the flavors while subduing the sharpness. Production is sparse, there’s more space in the music, the guitarwork is interesting but without most of the sharpness. The mellow delivery lets the music bloom.**

There are nice elements on the front half of the record. "Walk On" and "See the Sky About to Rain" could fit on a number of earlier Neil Young albums, and I really dig the subtle guitar work that closes out "Vampire Blues." But it’s the back half that makes the album for me. The guitar work in “On the Beach” sounds emotive in the best sort of bluesy way, and the quiet acoustic guitar work on the last two tracks is some of my favorite work he’s done. “Ambulance Blues” has been called Young’s “Desolation Row” and the meandering delivery and stellar guitar make the comparison understandable.  But Neil doesn’t have the lyrical chops of Dylan, and while his singing is emotive in a similar fashion to Dylan, his sneer is of different type.*** 

* Titus and Neil are not the tightest of pairings, but it works. Neil Young is a hippy, but he’s got enough ornery punk fuck-it-all attitude to fit the bill. Titus Andronicus stretch the shit out of their punk anthems. Whiskey goes well with both. And there’s this.

** Correlation is not causation, but this mellowness may be a byproduct of the creative process used while recording the album, which involved consumption of “a homemade concoction dubbed ‘Honey Slides’, a goop of sauteed marijuana and honey that ‘felt like heroin’.”

*** I haven’t mentioned the album’s lyrics? Telling. Typical Neil Young lyrics: a smattering of lines that cause a smile, either for good reasons and bad; enough imagery to work even when the snippets never get stitched together. There’s nothing quotable enough to fit in this song, but you do get this bit of wisdom: “Though my problems are meaningless / That don’t make them go away.”

-a.s.