A paraplegic since 1983 and an
acclaimed singer/songwriter since 1988, when he was Officially
Discovered by Michael Stipe, Vic Chesnutt has enjoyed a long,
prolific, and adventurous career. He’s cut albums with scores
of supporting musicians — from countrypolitan iconoclasts
Lambchop to jam-band stalwarts Widespread Panic — but no
matter how dramatically his sound has evolved, his style is
unmistakable, stamped with an acerbic wit and an oversized heart.
His real trademark, though, is that reedy, attenuated moan of a
voice, a craggy baritone that sometimes morphs into a fragile
falsetto. More like sorghum than butter, Chesnutt’s voice may
be an acquired taste, but once acquired, it’s addictive. It
doesn’t deliver his songs so much as embody them, and
it’s the perfect counterpart to his rickety soul/folk
arrangements and oddball lyrical bent.
On Ghetto Bells, Chesnutt’s 12th full-length, that miraculous
voice receives what may be its most sympathetic backing yet, thanks
to post-jazz troubadour Bill Frisell, iconic arranger and
multiinstrumentalist Van Dyke Parks, and drummer Don Heffington of
Lone Justice and the Jayhawks. (Rounding out this dream lineup is
legendary session player Dominic Genova on double bass;
Chesnutt’s wife and longtime collaborator, Tina, on electric
bass; and newcomer Liz Durrett on backing vocals.) Culled from more
than 50 demos under the guidance of producer John Chelew, the 11
tracks on Ghetto Bells are suffused with a quiet intensity; the
tempo is slow but never laid-back, stately but never languid. The
longest and prettiest song, “Forthright,” clocks in at
seven-and-a-half minutes and creeps along like one of those dreams
in which you’re trying to run in waist-deep invisible mud;
with Frisell’s queasily elegant guitar counterpoint and
Heffington’s understated percussion, it develops so
effectively, so inevitably, that you’ll want to hit the
repeat button as soon as it ends.
Other standouts are less dilatory but no less
effective: The Durrett duet “What Do You Mean?” has a koan-like transparency,
and “Little Caesar” pits a wheezing accordion against
scabrous backward guitars while Chesnutt intones dour and
all-too-relevant lines such as “The Holy Roman Emperor bequeathed
the crown by birth/And so the public has spoken with resounding
clarity/As to who they trust and in what they believe/And they’ve
proven that it’s futile to resist the cult of Little Caesar/Do so
at your own peril and risk.” True to Chesnutt’s
idiosyncratic genius, however, the prevailing mood is one of optimism
— a crooked, creaky, cobbled-together optimism, to be sure, but
we’ll take our hope where we can find it.
The
Fallen Leaf Pages, the fourth
full-length from the Los Angeles-based Radar Brothers, is not the
kind of record you’ll want to load onto the iPod for
treadmill sessions at the gym — unless, of course, you intend
to burn as few calories as possible, with ample time to ponder the
wisdom of insects, the beauty of our fallen world, and the human
capacity for self-delusion. This is the ideal soundtrack not to a
stupid workout but to a reflective stroll through the park: Listen
as you admire the clouds of gnats hovering in the springtime
twilight, the bruise-blue sky, the trembling irises. Like previous
Radar Brothers’ albums, Pages was recorded at frontman Jim Putnam’s Skylab
studio, and it’s a sprawling, symphonic marvel, tricked out
with a wide range of instruments but strangely spacious-sounding,
like a desert-parched Pink Floyd or the Beach Boys fronted by
Philip K. Dick and relocated to some dystopian colony on Mars.
Although Putnam’s lyrics are famously dreary, the layers of
chiming guitars and gentle pianos leaven the bleakness, creating a
radiant space-folk for backward-looking futurists and gym defectors
alike.
This article appears in Apr 28 – May 4, 2005.
