The albums of 2005

Ok, for my first proper post, here are two album reviews - my thoughts on what I think have been the best two records released in 2005.

Modern Folk

A review of Bright Eyes’ I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning

Let’s be honest. The opening minute or so of this album is pretty pretentious. It’s one of those spoken introductions which I guess are supposed to sound off-the-cuff and ad-libbed. We hear Conor Oberst take a scripted sip from a glass of water, and then tell a story about a woman sitting on an aeroplane with a silent man…the plane crashes…the man speaks to the woman…and he sounds like a parent speaking to a small child – “We love you very, very, very, very, very much”. And then the fun begins. Because for all the planned implied nostalgia of the opening, this is a really good album – acoustic, loud and varied. This is a folk record for the modern day.

The first song, At the Bottom of Everything, introduces the listener to several of this album’s trademarks and recurring themes. Bright Eyes have created a remarkably economical use of music. Whether in the ballads or the loud and angry numbers, there are never many instruments on display at one time, and the sound quality has a metallic, verging on tinny, edge to it. There is no fuzz or feedback, and the harmonies have oceans between them – the singers are literally octaves apart, and the fused wall of sound that close harmony bands generate is a world away. Oberst is economical with his sentiments too, as the opening track demonstrates. After all its build-up, with bats, belfries, guns and deep water, it ends with the most throwaway and Zen-like of declamations: I’m happy just because I found out I’m really no one.

At the Bottom of Everything also contains some incredibly rapid mandolin arpeggio picking – avoiding easy-way-out repeated notes, this is Nebraska’s guitar picking speeded up a hundred-fold. Generally the album’s instrumentation is constantly interesting – and if this sounds like faint praise, listen to the way the brass instruments come in at the expense of the conventional band rather than to supplement it. This is an acoustic album with a difference.

And then there is Oberst’s voice. He has been accused of shouting instead of singing during his live performances, and there is an element of this on this album. There is certainly little finesse to the way he gets his words out, and although on some occasions he does show his gentle side, there is just so much emotion that you get the feeling he has to semi-speak some of his lines, because these are merely words which he has to get across to you; the fact that they’re part of a song is secondary. (For those of you who are by now fearing a vocal horror show – don’t panic. Emmylou Harris is a prominent and sublime guest on the album. Her performance on We Are Nowhere and It’s Now is reminiscent less of her recent duets with alt-country pin-up boys and more of her latter-day solo albums, and this record is all the better for it.)

So what is his voice – however imperfect – actually saying? What is the message that is so important that he has to express it in such a raw and unharnessed manner? Again we need to be honest – this album is not about getting across a new message, some revolutionary comment. But that’s okay; because what it does is communicate some classic political and cultural themes in an original manner. The gorgeous, gorgeous ballad (a duet with Emmylou Harris) Landlocked Blues delivers new ways of singing old laments:

A good woman will pick you apart
A box full of suggestions for your possible heart
But you may be offended and you may be afraid
But don’t walk away, don’t walk away

And the album’s starting point, a reflection on the narrator’s younger days, is re-employed to make poetical comment on the degeneracy of society:

And there’s kids playing guns in the street
And ones pointing his tree branch at me
So I put my hands up I say “enough is enough, If you walk away, I’ll walk away”
And he shot me dead

Bright Eyes’ fame was done no harm at all by their status as support act to Bruce Springsteen and REM during last year’s anti-Bush Vote for Change tour. But it would be a brave soul who denied that the tour was a home from home for the band. The album’s closing number, Road to Joy, again displays a refreshing originality in the way it lambasts the current US administration. It may take a couple of listens to reassure you that the song, at the point it really gets going, is an ironic take on what seems to be the attitude of Bush and company:

So when you’re asked to fight a war that’s over nothing
It’s best to join the side that’s gonna win
And no one’s sure how all of this got started
But we’re gonna make them goddam certain how its gonna end
Oh ya we will, oh ya we will!

After that, there is little more to say, and Conor Oberst is consistent to the end – a swift moment of self-depreciation as he makes fun of his own voice, another brief and concentrated burst of rage, and then a sudden (not violent, just abrupt) conclusion. That’s all, folks. No time for time-wasting – he got all that out of his system in the first minute of the album. The rest of it is purely and concisely crafted, and the result is the real deal.


Bruce Springsteen – Devils & Dust

Right around the time that most of America’s other major songwriters were making albums with a scaled-down sound, with a proud and organic acoustic sound reflective of the resurgence of folk and country music all the way down the food chain, Bruce Springsteen made The Rising (2002). Produced by Brendan O’Brien, famous for making records with a succession of hard-rocking bands, the album did not disappoint in that respect. The Rising is to be commended for trying to combine anti war sentiments with empathy for the victims of 9/11. But through a combination of the choice of title track, the songs chosen to open concerts on the tie-in tour (The Rising and Lonesome Day), and the fact that this was the first album recorded by the entire E Street Band in almost twenty years, The Rising is best remembered for its tub-thumping songs rather than its more thoughtfully-written and interesting-sounding songs. The sound on the album’s ‘big’ songs comes at you like a wash – nothing quite as well-defined as the wall of sound which Born to Run (1975) used to such great effect; more a big wet wave swooping at you with all the solid determination of a floundering fish.

Springsteen’s latest offering, Devils & Dust, is a different breed of album. Different stylistically, as the artist displays a delayed reaction to the ‘Americana’ boom and makes his own intimate, small-band album; different in terms of quality, because the album is a masterpiece.

Eight years ago, in his mid-fifties, Bob Dylan released Time Out of Mind (1997) – a much-vaunted return to form, in which the songwriter explored personal themes to a garage-band type backing. Springsteen is around the same age now that Dylan was when he made that album, and in a sense Devils & Dust is his Time Out of Mind. The songs are deeply personal – whether fictional or otherwise – and the directly political and economic messages of Springsteen’s 1995 album, The Ghost of Tom Joad, are rejected in favour of a more nuanced, personal, socio-political approach.

The title track, which opens the album, is an anti-war song of sorts: “I got my finger on the trigger / But I don’t know who to trust”. But as it winds towards its conclusion, and the band gradually grows, the subject matter surprisingly becomes more introspective, and the chorus asks more questions than it answers:

Well I’ve got God on my side
And I’m just trying to survive
What if what you do to survive
Kills the things you love

The next few songs follow similar personal lines, in the style of Springsteen’s best songwriting. All the Way Home is a re-hash of a song he wrote many years ago, but O’Brien’s production brings the song in line with the mood of the rest of the album. Springsteen swallows and mumbles his words as only he can, and it is left to O’Brien to command the song’s image with a McCartney-esque melodic bass line. Following this, Reno tells the story of a man who seeks solace from his problems with a prostitute – and doesn’t find anything like what he was after. Long Time Comin’ is an instrumental vehicle for the album’s small core band – Marty Rifkin excels on steel guitar. In actual fact, though, it is Springsteen's own guitar which defines the album’s sound for the most part. His acoustic playing always comes across as more thoughtful and mature than his electric playing (which sounds impressive but is actually not terribly imaginative). And on this album, it is his well-placed (at times sparse) acoustic playing which creates the album’s mood – intimate and reflective without being nostalgic or mawkish.

The middle part of Devils & Dust is what defines it as one Springsteen’s finest albums, artistically speaking. Black Cowboys is a tale of some forgotten heroes of Oklahoma, told through the eyes of a young boy. As you listen to the quiet, acoustic rumblings of the number, you are practically there in that dry place when

Come the fall the rain flooded these homes. Here in Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones, it fell hard and dark to the ground.

Some song lyrics are described as poetry, but usually this doesn’t really work – even the greatest song lyrics can sound somewhat silly without musical backing. But what Springsteen has created here is great prose – words which tell a short story in pure narrative form. It is no small achievement to shape such a story into a song. The CD slip-cover recognises this new style of songwriting, as the lyrics to this (and some other) songs are printed in paragraph form rather than line by line. Pretentious? A little. But some of these songs come close to being more story than song.

Springsteen’s tendency to mumble has been referred to, but the reader should not go away with the impression that that is the main vocal style of this album. The variety on display is actually very rich, to the extent that Springsteen complements three of the album’s lighter songs with a falsetto vocal. On Maria’s Bed and All I’m Thinkin’ About in particular, his high-pitched voice sounds surprisingly well-formed, and it seems to drive the band into playing with an impish delight, touching their strings and skins rather than striking and beating them.

Finally, Springsteen does recall the politics of the immigrant that underpinned The Ghost of Tom Joad. Matamoros Banks, with which Devils & Dust draws to a close, is a sister track to Across the Border – a poignant tale of love, loss and the search for a better life in the United States. The irony of such a dream cannot be lost on the artist, opening the album as he does with the line “I got my finger on the trigger”. But the humanity of both songs rings through - along with thanks to some higher being, Matamoros Banks’ narrator sings

Your sweet memory comes on the evenin’ wind
I sleep and dream of holding you in my arms again

The similarity with the picture painted in such all-American Springsteen songs as No Surrender cannot be lost on the listener, and perhaps this is what lies at the heart of the message of Devil & Dust – although there is a lot wrong with the world, and with the United States, the remedies and palliatives which Springsteen offers have remained consistent – love, hope and good dreams. With this album, he has kept that message alive by communicating it in a fresh manner, using a new music, and it really works.