Month: February 2020

To Love the Mystery: The Innocence Mission’s bigger things unseen

.Reading time 7 minutes.

See You Tomorrow

See You Tomorrow, the twelfth album from The Innocence Mission, opens with a song called “The Brothers Williams Said,” which captures one of the ultimate introvert dilemas: When your nature is to be shy and reserved, how do you convey your love and affection to the people around you? The song’s protagonist moves quietly through life offering small gestures of warmth and charity; a smile on the streets, a friendly wave to passersby. Such grace notes are lost on the fellows who give the song its title (“The Brothers Williams said/ you don’t ever talk”), but they are not lost on the narrator, who speaks words of encouragement and gratitude: “The kindness of your face/ does not go unrecognized/ has not refused to shine/ in this most difficult time.”

This is about as Innocence Mission-y as a song can get. They have arguably never written anything more on-brand, except perhaps for deep cut “When Mac Was Swimming,” about a little boy lost at play, unaware of the loved ones scurrying about to make his birthday celebration special. Songs like these speak to what makes The Innocence Mission one of the most irreplaceable of bands: There are few songwriters who would be as sensitive in capturing the shy person’s plight. And there are none who have amassed such a treasure trove of songs that find holy wonder and simple beauty in everyday acts of connection. If The Innocence Mission was special for no other reason, they would be special for their recurring subject matter: Kindness. Humility. Mercy. Compassion. Our shared need to be seen. To show others that we see them.

There is a reasonable criticism to be made that the band returns to the same well over and over, not just in content but in sound. It’s true that their albums since We Walked in Song have all felt of a piece. They are all lovingly crafted basement recordings made by the Peris family— Karen and Don, occasionally joined by their string-playing children or bassist pal Mike Bitts. Karen fills each album with delicate singing and carefully-stanzaed lyrics that draw deeply from poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins. Don provides the gentle rustle of acoustic guitar strings, as clarion as cathedral bells, and the occasional smudge of shoegaze atmospherics. These recordings are simple but sound lush; you can often hear the crack and hiss of the tape rolling, romantic swells of pump organ, accordion, and creaking piano. They are quiet, too, except when they are loud: When a drum kit enters toward the end of “We Don’t Know How to Say Why,” a highlight of the new album, it sounds like thunder. See You Tomorrow is enchanting for all of the same reasons that Sun on the Square was enchanting, but there’s a difference between a band that’s directionless and a band that’s faithful to a very particular muse. The Perises stand alone in their attentiveness to this niche of beauty, this reservoir of quiet, this oasis of kindness and vulnerability.

Their masterpiece of storytelling remains Birds of My Neighborhood, which aches with lamentation and hope during a difficult season. But since then, Karen’s writing has become even more impressively succinct and incisive. On song after song she imbues the mundane with meaning, and a lot of See You Tomorrow is spent gently kneading the wordless and ineffable into beautiful, precise language. Listen to the sensitivity with which she sketches a character in “We Don’t Know How to Say Why,” who only wants “to be loved as much as anyone,” then bursts into tears from an undefinable longing. “At Lake Maureen” uses an afternoon hiking and sailing to meditate on the mysteries of time’s passage (“I feel something new about you/ every day of the world”). In “St. Francis and the Future,” the narrator wants only to stay where she is with her loved ones, and to keep change and uncertainty as far-off as possible (“Oh, make the future small”). And who can’t relate to the voice at the center of “The Brothers Williams Said,” who wishes she could “love the mystery/ and have no tears that there can be no better understanding.” These songs live in the peculiar glow of all the things we can never fully understand or articulate, but are caught up in nevertheless; what Joe Henry calls the “bigger things unseen.”

At first blush, the albums of The Innocence Mission can sometimes sound like they belong to another world entirely, one where beauty is savored and where people are more decent. But there is no Thomas Kinkade-style idyll, no denial of this world’s hardship. You certainly hear it in Birds of My Neighborhood, an album that attests to disappointment, barrenness, and sorrow. As for See You Tomorrow, perhaps it’s a noteworthy coincidence that the album was released around the same time as the Drive-by Truckers record The Unraveling, which chronicles contemporary malaise with diaristic precision (song titles include “Babies in Cages” and “21st Century USA”) and basically amounts to a nihilistic howl. It’s a lament from a slipstream far beyond our control; See You Tomorrow, with its songs about time and uncertainty and fickle emotion, is not entirely dissimilar. But into the wild and the uncontainable, the Peris family offers a tender gift of grace, peace, and kindness; proof that these, too, are among the bigger things unseen.

Pieces of a Man: On the run with Gil Scott-Heron and Makaya McCraven

.Reading time 7 minutes.

we're new again review

Was there ever really a home for Gil Scott-Heron? Throughout his abbreviated life he seemed to pine for one, even as he harborded disbelief that such a place could ever exist. In his seminal albums from the 1970s— outpourings of conscience and lament— the poet-singer bore witness against racial and economic injustice like a wild voice in the wilderness; a citizen of the promised land who knew he’d be forever estranged from its abundance. He was alienated not just from his country, but from himself. One famous song posited that “Home is Where the Hatred Is,” an admission that for a lifelong addict there’s no haven to be found; no shelter from the treacheries of the flesh. Home sounded equally unattainable some 40 years later, when an album called I’m New Here reflected on a life spent on the run. (“Not running for cover/ because if I knew where cover was/ I would stay there and never have to run for it,” he reasoned.) Much of that album was devoted to the strong women who raised him, gave him peace and shelter, provided him with light unto his path and a foundation of love and support. But still he ran. A year later, he was dead from the complications of HIV and years of substance abuse. A perpetual prodigal, a lifelong exilee. Did he ever find cover? Did he ever find home?

The sense of displacement Scott-Heron embodied in life— and the unsettledness he conjured in his music— makes him a strangely perfect candidate for a project like We’re New Again, which marks the third distinct presentation of his I’m New Here material. The original album was made in tandem with producer Richard Russell, who adorned Scott-Heron’s creaky intonations in spectral electronics. We’re New Here, an album-length remix from Jamie xx, was released just a year later. We’re New Again is the latest tribute to Scott-Heron as a man fraying at the edges; a scruffy character whose life and work were proudly unvarnished and unfinished, and whose legacy exists not as settled business but as a set of open questions ripe for relitigation. At the helm this time is drummer/composer Makaya McCraven, one of our great jazz visionaries. It’s not quite right to call McCraven’s album a remix. It’s a full reimagining, using the late poet’s final recorded words as building blocks but stacking them against a rich backdrop of live performance and convincing post-production effects. One of the most famous Gil Scott-Heron records is called Pieces of a Man, and that’s still what’s on offer today: Shards of a beautiful man and a broken life, submitted to us as runes to be reassessed and reassembled. 

As Mark Richardson notes, “McCraven brings Scott-Heron’s work down to earth and situates it in a milieu the elder artist would have recognized,” running the gamut from spirited soul-jazz to lived-in blues. It feels more in-tune with Scott-Heron’s black music affinities than either of the albums that preceded it. And yet, in McCraven’s splicing, dicing, sampling, and imaginative recontextualizations, it also bears witness to Scott-Heron as a forward thinker and hip-hop originator. It’s a smart positioning for Scott-Heron’s legacy, and it’s an advantageous setting for McCraven. He’s all but unmatched at weaving together grooves and textures and micro-moments into immersive suites of sound, an approach he blew up to epic lengths on Universal Beings. We’re New Again allows him to make similarly evocative music, but with Scott-Heron’s words as a focal point. McCraven and his collaborators (including Jeff Parker) rise to the occasion with both narrative clarity and disorientation: “Where Did the Night Go” is a trippy nightmare of trilling flutes and drum kit bluster, as gently unmooring as the Heffalumps and Woozles dream sequence from Winnie the Pooh. “Running” is set to an insistent hip-hop beat, McCraven’s timekeeping cruel and unrelenting. “I’ll Take Care of You,” Scott-Heron’s turn as a piano crooner, is presented in all its parched vulnerability; a declaration of fidelity that’s really an admission of raw need.

McCraven gives us stirring music and high drama, alternating between fleshed-out songs and fragmented soliloquies. But there is a real sense of thematic development here, empathy for Scott-Heron’s life spent on the lam. “Running” still feels like a thesis statement (“because the thing I fear cannot be escaped”). There’s also “The Crutch,” presented here as a distorted electric blues, a song for men who carefully evade the kindness of God or the universe (“when the world reached out, they chose to flee”). On I’m New Here, Scott-Heron gave us a tender reflection on the grandmother who raised him (“absolutely not your mail order, room service, typecast black grandmother”). McCraven divides it into four separate tracks, left scattered throughout the album like breadcrumbs. There’s also the “I’m New Here” theme, recurring on multiple songs as a reminder that there’s never any wanderer who’s strayed too far (“no matter how far wrong you’ve gone/ you can always turn around”). But McCraven gives the last word to “Me and the Devil,” Scott-Heron’s take on Robert Johnson. Amidst gnarled guitars and swaggering brass, Scott-Heron warns against the Evil One. There is always something to run from.

Mama Gotta Hustle: Tami Neilson redefines retro

.Reading time 6 minutes.

tami neilson chickaboom

Everything about Tami Neilson is a throwback— from her beehive hairdo to the faded glam-shot artwork of her new album, CHICKABOOM! Even the ad copy that appears under the album title, anointing her “The Hot Rockin’ Lady of Country, Rockabilly & Soul,” seems to promise something like an old-timey magic trick; a costumed conjuring of something you’d typically only see at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But anyone expecting museum memorabilia or nostalgic wish fulfillment has never heard the hot rockin’ lady sing. While it’s true that CHICKABOOM! dazzles in its retro chic, at times suggesting a stylish soundtrack to an imagined Quentin Tarantino film, the music is just too loud, too raucous, too electric to ever sound like a relic. Wherever Neilson does her thing, no dust can settle, no cobwebs can form.

CHICKABOOM! isn’t a nostalgia play so much as a reinvigoration of classic tropes— a combustible cross-pollination of Wanda Jackson riffs, Patsy Cline waterworks, Bo Diddley thunder, and, on “Any Fool with a Heart,” soft-touch uptown pop. All of it’s presented not with an archivist’s academic caution, but with a stage actress’ dramatic flair and a garage band’s appetite for destruction. It feels very much like the right kind of album for Neilson to make following 2018’s superb SASSAFRASS!, which went deep and wide and showed the full range of what she’s capable of. Her virtuosity indisputable, Neilson can now turn her attention to just blowing shit up, which is kinda what CHICKABOOM! feels like: A box of fireworks, where the singer lights one short fuse after another and lets these songs burn fast and bright in a blaze of snarling guitars and crackling drums. It’s almost like a jukebox singles record, where there’s never a dull moment and only a couple of songs that push past three minutes; in the longest, “When You Were Mine,” Neilson uses the full three-and-a-half minute runway to mine maximum existential anguish from her Muscle Shoals hotbox. More representative of the album’s spring-loaded mayhem is “Hey Bus Driver!,” a concentrated dose of thumping toms, barbed-wire guitar riffs, and punchy Sun Records primitivism. 

Neilson grew up touring and singing in a family band, showbiz experience that’s always been her secret weapon: She’s got obvious natural talent but also knows how to sing with clarity and precision, how to hit her marks, how to work a crowd. “When You Were Mine” is the showstopper, the one where Neilson starts in the low embers of the blues and builds to in-the-red catharsis, putting her vocal cords straight through the shredder as she howls in anguish. It’s a controlled eruption, and a stark contrast to the nonchalant opener “Call Your Mama,” where Neilson sends an unworthy dude packing, brandishing sneers and snarls like a showboating gunslinger. She’s also unafraid to ham it up sometimes, cackling her way through “Ten Tonne Truck,” about a successful woman laughing all the way to the bank. (“HA HA HA!”)

The album’s 10 little bottle rockets— originals, once again written with brother Jay, who also sings and plays on the album— address concerns that never go out of style: Love, heartbreak, hard work, the open road, money and its absence. The heartbreak songs are imaginative: “16 Miles of Chain” is a hardscrabble drama where love is literal imprisonment, while “You Were Mine” looks to a formative loss as an event that cleaved time in two. But Neilson is at her best, her toughest, her prickliest when she’s singing about her hustle, as she does in “Ten Tonne Truck,” about the alchemic formula of luck and grit required to make big bucks in Nashville. Speaking of which, it wouldn’t be a Tami Neilson album without a few choice words about the absence of women on today’s country charts, something she takes care of with mirthless one-liners in “Queenie, Queenie.” The same song gets to another of her core strengths, which is embodying a feminism that ennobles domesticity and leaves plenty of room for working mothers. “What’s a stay-at-home mom do with all that time?” she deadpans as the bills and dirty dishes pile up, drums clattering like a ticking timebomb or a Jeopardy! buzzer. That song is a pressure cooker, but there’s release in “Sister Mavis,” a pentecostal rave-up where Neilson rides high atop handclaps and jangling tambourines, espousing a holy canon where synoptic gospels share space with Mavis Staples, Sister Rosetta, and Mahila Jackson. There’s nothing stuffy or forced about its hero worship: Like the rest of CHICKABOOM!, it uses the past as a powder keg; the first spark of a righteous ruckus. 

Objects of Affection: Jeff Parker’s sweet specificity

.Reading time 4 minutes.

suite for max brown

Jazz guitarist Jeff Parker wrote and recorded Suite for Max Brown in dedication to his mother, whose image graces the album’s cover. You don’t actually have to know that in order to enjoy the largely instrumental album, which offers much to savor with or without the backstory. But when you do know it, it brings this curious piece of music into clearer view. Parker’s intentions explain why the music sounds so lovingly detailed without sounding fussy or overworked; how Suite for Max Brown is such a delicate and particular object of affection, like a Mother’s Day card made with macaroni and glue. 

Maybe that description makes the album sound small, which it is. While some records impress with their scope and their sprawl, Suite for Max Brown is an intimate collection of humble pleasures, derived from laid-back jazz, electronic beat-making, and ambient tranquility; it’s a mosaic of textures, colors, and grooves that extol specificity and warrant close attention. (The album’s modesty makes it a surprising but not unworthy choice for Pitchfork’s first “Best New Music” designation of the decade.) It’s no accident that the album’s lone vocal number, “Build a Nest,” finds Parker’s daughter Ruby espousing the virtues of slowing down, eschewing hustle and bustle, and assiduously constructing something that’s made to last. While Suite for Max Brown flits from one micro-moment to the next, each of those moments feels like it’s been placed with care, imbued with affection, and offered as a focal point for obsession; the music covers a lot of ground but somehow feels unhurried. Its grace is most evident in a glowing rendition of John Coltrane’s “After the Rain,” a moment of zen that revels in mind-clearing languor and pace-setting deliberation. 

So while Parker’s songs are generous with memorable melodies and robust performances, you’re just as likely to latch onto the droning keyboard tone that sounds through “Fusion Swirl,” as if it’s suspended in zero gravity; the loose rattle of Jay Bellerose’s tambourine on “3 for L”; the bright chimes and ringing bells of “Metamorphoses.” Parker curates these micro-moments for their sensual pleasures, their tactility, their instant earworm-ability. That doesn’t leave a ton of space for him to shred— if it’s guitar heroics you’re after, try Julian Lage or The Messthetics— but he does dole out clear, supple licks on the strolling “3 for L,” and on “Go Away,” a full studio band works up a full head of steam, locking into a roiling Afrobeat groove.

One of the album’s most precious curios is “C’mon Now,” a 20-second loop of Otis Redding’s vocal exhortations. It functions as an interlude, yet feels like so much more. It positions Parker’s music on the same continuum with Makaya McCraven, Flying Lotus, and the late J Dilla, auteurs whose work bridges the divide between jazz improvisation and hip-hop splicing-and-dicing. (McCraven also plays on a few of these songs.) In other words, it’s a small gesture toward the big picture. But there are other ways to receive these Otis grunts and incantations: Perhaps they are here to remind us that every moment, every syllable is an opportunity for close attention; or perhaps simply because Jeff Parker knows somebody who loves hearing Otis Redding sing.