And so on to one of the most over-rated albums of all time, For Emma Forever Ago (2008) by Bon Iver. Besides having one of the most cloyingly twee album titles it's also a determinedly insipid listen. In some ways it sounds like something a Brits school teacher would write as an example of how to appeal to "sensitive indie types". Alright, that's going a bit far, but really, what is the big deal? There's virtually nothing I really like about For Emma Forever Ago; I don't like the falsetto, I don't like the downhome lo-fi, I don't like the melancholic atmosphere, I don't like the back story of him retreating to a cabin in the woods to songwrite out his demons about his failing relationship. And the reason I don't like any of those things is because I'm sure they're all bullshit. It's all a crock, I don't believe any of it. The whole thing absolutely stinks of pretence and schtick, it feels horribly calculated. And what's more, virtually the whole thing had already been done by another bullshitting chancer, Micah P. Hinson. Anyway, whatever, even if you put all that to one side, it's not much more than alright I suppose.
And it's appropriate that we should move directly on to someone who trades in this sort of stock but of a much higher quality and with much more interesting intent. Frankly Justin Vernon is Nick Hornby to Will Oldham's Dostoevsky. Criminally I've never picked up I See a Darkness, so for the Bonnie 'Prince' Billy section we start with Ease Down the Road (2001). After the various Palace records, Ease Down the Road was surprisingly polished and it doesn't suffer in any way for it. If anything it really helps to underscore just what fabulous songs these really are. Incredibly strongly structured and brilliantly constructed, using influence in a fluid but honest way. In many ways Ease Down the Road is the most honest distillation of Americana so far recorded because I think a lot of Americana acts would really like to be able to use the leftist country roots style and do it justice, but because most of them simply can't they opt for a more lo-fi approach. Ease Down the Road was, I think, Will Oldham's way of saying that his lo-fi work is a choice, not a necessity.
Master and Everyone (2003) is a partial return to the more grimily recorded and super downbeat version of songwriting that Oldham was more familiarly known for. It's a great record, brief, concise and loaded with both emotion and irony, as most of his records are. In some ways this period of Oldham's career was relatively poorly recieved critically, which to my mind shows how little people understood what he was trying to do. There's something tragic about the average music fan and the average music critic's determination to believe that "darkness", "authenticity", all that hokum which is all made up nonsense in the first place, is the benchmark by which certain forms of music should be judged. I think that Oldham is simply fascinated by the structure of American music and uses it in various ways to explore its potential. Hence some records are lo-fi, downbeat, and therefore invariably appeal to the fairly thoughtless, over-earnest listeners, and some are brighter and looser with a clearer nod to country music at its most accessible. The greatest crime that Oldham committed as far as some were concerned was in releasing Greatest Palace Music (2004), an album on which he re-recorded his own songs in a polished, brighter way. Hilariously what I think people were furious about was the sense that they were foolish to have taken the gloom at face value and that Oldham himself clearly has always had his tongue in his cheek, at least some of the time (the super-fun version of 'I Am a Cinematographer' is clearly irony in overload). Greatest Palace Music is a truly lovely album, and I tend to listen to it not as reworkings of his own songs but as an album of new material. The arrangements are so different and the mood such a deliberate (and wilfully upbeat) contrast to the original settings, it's pointless to listen to it as being versions of the same songs.
There's another mixture of various low-key approaches on 2006's The Letting Go. Again, it's a long way from the ragged shambling of earlier Palace albums, but it's also nowhere near as ornate and polished as Greatest Palace Music. It's closer to Master & Everyone than anything else, but it's still a fairly unique album in its own right. There are straight late-blues workouts, fabulous downbeat country songs, and there are prominent counterpoint vocals from Dawn McCarthy throughout, which is a new development. In terms of songwriting it's another supremely accomplished set, and it's an impressive record all round really. In 2007 the demo tapes that Oldham and McCarthy exchanged when writing The Letting Go were released as Wai Notes. It's interesting stuff, very lo-fi, scrappy, press-play-and-record, but as a little insight into the collaborative working process it's pretty revealing.
Window, handle, vandal - yep, those are rhymes according to the mighty Betty Boo's 'Where Are you Baby' (1990), one of the greatest singles of the 1990's. It's a blistering work of philosphical import, intellectual rigour, and I for one can't remember another top 40 single that grapples with the complications of assessing the relationship between one's moral philosophy and the need to successfully exist in a world of increasingly complex ethical challenges. It's a work of remarkable assiduity and perspicacity and it challenges any preconceived notion of inherent value in the creation of art, as well as instituting a definitively new way of using deconstructivist thought in the application of critical judgment. The B-side, 'Boo's Boogie', is shit though.
About 20 years ago I saw the JB's play in a sweaty club in Bristol and it was awesome. Maceo and Pee Wee were playing, but there weren't many of the others who moved out of James Brown's collective and into George Clinton's. And there was certainly no Bootsy Collins, whose Bootsy's Rubber Band albums were the second tier behind Clinton's own Parliament/Funkadelic records. Stretchin' Out with Bootsy's Rubber Band (1976) is one side of decent hard funk and one side of slower numbers that might impress the lay-days. On the whole I don't really understand "the funk" and so a lot of stuff that people say is particularly good sounds much the same as other stuff to me. I can only go entirely on whether I like on song more than another therefore, and Stretchin' Out doesn't get me going completely nuts. It's pretty funky on the first side, pretty smooth on the second, and there isn't too much P-Funk "wackiness" to get annoyed about either. It's all pretty good, I like it well enough. Second album, Ahh...The Name is Bootsy, Baby! (1977) is more of the same, with Bootsy's absurdly elastic bass piledriving its funky way through the tunes, most of which have a solid swagger and a kind of reckless funkiness about them, the rest a slick smoothness. It's a great album and it also showcases Bootsy's gloriously kaleidoscopic personality.
More Bootsy tomorrow, a bunch of Boss Hog and Bowie.
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