Real Life Rock (305 page)

7
Swamp Dogg,
Total Destruction to Your Mind
(Alive)
In 1970, Jerry Williams was a very odd, very funny, very catholic soul singer who sang protest songs—his, Joe South's, whatever moved him. He sang about racism, pollution, alienation, and he never held still; with his crying voice and a lot of wah-wah guitar, he could make the corniest conceit into a true heartbreaker. “Synthetic World” is convincing simply on the basis of its melody, but “The World Beyond,” a very slow ballad about nuclear holocaust, takes every cliché to the edge of tragedy. A man dreams about a little boy listening as his father tells him “of the world that used to be.” But the father never says a word. The song is all the boy's questions, and each one is more painful than the one before it, sometimes less for the words (“Did concrete cover the land? / And what was a rock 'n' roll band?”) than for Williams's voice, so deep with a plea for understanding, comfort, physical contact, a random smile, that you want to reach through the speakers and tell him it will be OK. Except he's already convinced you it won't be, and that you can't reach him: “What was a dog, and what was a shoe?”

8
John Parish,
Screenplay
(Thrill Jockey)
An album drawn from pieces composed for various contemporary movies (
Sister, Little Black Spiders, Plein Sud
), but that's not how it plays. What you're hearing is the soundtrack to an imaginary European film noir set in the mid-'60s—maybe the 1965
Symphony for a Massacre
, which has disappeared so completely it might as well be imaginary. You watch your movie as you listen, wondering which of the characters you've cast will make it to the end.

9
Nicolas Rapold, review of
Love and Honor
(
New York Times,
March 21)
“The setting is that tragic time in our nation's history” when “federal law apparently mandated the playing of ‘Magic Carpet Ride.' Predictable consequences unfold when . . .”

10
Daniel Wolff, “Postcards of the Hanging,”
Oxford American
(spring)
The best art criticism I've read in ages: a short, plainly written walk-around in Bob Dylan's “Desolation Row,” teasing out why the end of the song is the beginning and the beginning
the end—and why it is, like so many other tunes that seem like something else (“Bob Dylan's 115th Dream,” “Highlands,” “Ain't Talkin' ”), a protest song. “A bluesy harmonica replaces the voice. It smears across the other instruments, almost knocking the lead guitar off-rhythm. Like a blackout after a string of scenes. Or like speech when speech doesn't work anymore.”

JULY-AUGUST
2013

1
Eleanor Friedberger, “I Am the Past,” from
Personal Record
(Merge Records)
The song doesn't just get under your skin, it seems to emerge from under your skin, a memory lost a lifetime ago, but somehow now speaking in its own, full voice. On her second solo album, Friedberger is bright, light, taking pleasure from the softly bouncing melody, the muted trombone, the skipping flute, letting the darker shadows of her character—alluring, beckoning, irresistible, unnameable and unknowable—rise up and disappear. Is the sprite really singing only a nursery rhyme, as she says before she turns into something else? You could play this song all day long and not get to the bottom of “I am the past. . . . You have no idea what happened before me”—of the way Fried-berger floats through the words, turning them into a wave goodbye, Audrey Hepburn, her hair in a scarf, in a skiff, smiling as she slips over the horizon.

2
Jo Jackson, lettering; Chris Johanson, pictures; cover art for
Last Kind Words 1926–1953
(Mississippi Records, 2006)
This collection of blues and gospel, an out-of-print LP from a few years ago, is named for and leads off with Geeshie Wiley's 1930 “Last Kind Words Blues,” a song that carries the singer from a man's death to her own, and takes the uncanny as a walk down the street. The sleeve shows the walk down the street. It's a colorful folk-art grid of a pleasant, sunny, orderly American place, and all the people going from here to there, looking out the window, sitting on the pavement, and what they're saying, what they're thinking. Back cover, in a neighborhood of apartment houses: “I am like some kind of a log rolling.” “That's ok is it a fish I don't know what the hells going on anymore.” “It is hard to leave you.” “Death is only a dream.” “Ding dong.” “It was so careless so very careless.” “I'm going.” “I see you.” Front cover, downtown: “That is no way to get along don't now.” “Don't let nobody turn you round.” “Money can't buy your soul.” “Salvation.” “No kind words nowhere.” “Death is only a dream.” It's a portrait of nearly complete isolation (a woman on the phone saying, “I called you this morning” might be talking to an actual person, or leaving a message), each phrase its own kind of last word, with no sense that anyone is listening, and most of the music—from Blind Willie and Kate McTell, the Mississippi Moaner, Robert Wilkins, Lulu Jackson, Cannon's Jug Stompers—falls just short.

3
Lightning Dust,
Fantasy
(Jagjaguwar)
On a third album, Amber Webber and Josh Wells let their music float just off the ground, the sometimes-harsh consonants or quick shifts in tone from
Lightning Dust
(2007) and
Infinite Light
(2009) falling away like clothes. What's left is a kind of séance. Webber's voice—bigger than that of Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval, less self-regarding than Lana Del Rey's, the closest analogue maybe Brit Marling's demeanor as the quietly terrifying cult leader in
Sound of My Voice
—hovers somewhere between life and death. It's not limbo, it's a country to explore. What happens there? People think they recognize each other as they pass in the air, but names arrive only in the mind after the other person has disappeared. How do people talk there? In incomplete sentences, with a tone that's unstable, that threatens to evaporate as you listen. With Cris Derksen's cello giving the music muscle and bone, it all comes to a head with “Agatha.” It's just over four minutes long; depending on your mood, it can feel like nine, it can feel like two. It won't hold its shape, it won't hold still.

4
Anaïs Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer, “Tam Lin,” from
Child Ballads
(Wilderland
Records)
Deep down, this is the tale biding its time inside Lightning Dust's sound: a ghost lover makes a woman pregnant, then turns into a wolf, a bear, and a lion before he appears naked in her arms as himself. In the full text of the ancient ballad, it's because he's cursed by a fairy; in Mitchell and Hamer's version, as they explained on the Scott Simon program on NPR, getting rid of the supernatural lets in the subconscious—the real home of fairies and ghosts. Mitchell steps through the song as if she's walking on water lilies, alive to the thrill of telling the best bedtime story in the world.