SOUNDTRACK: VIC CHESNUTT-North Star Deserter [CST046] (2007).
The only thing I knew about Vic Chesnutt before this CD was that he was the songwriter for a benefit CD called Sweet Relief II: The Gravity of the Situation (1996). I bought it mostly for Garbage’s “Kick My Ass” and Mary Margaret O’Hara’s “Florida”, not for Chesnutt, who I’d not heard of before then. Usually if you get a CD of covers of an artist that you like, it’s hard to remove the cover from the original. An album of covers by someone you don’t know is much easier to parse.
I got North Star Deserter because I’m a fan of the Constellation record label based in Montreal. They’ve released some great stuff over the years. Recently, they’ve diversified their lineup to include some unexpected artists. Like Vic Chesnutt.
The basic sound of this CD comes in two ways: acoustic guitar with world-weary singer, and acoustic guitar with world-weary singer and the baking cacophony of what is essentially Thee Silver Mt Zion Orchestra and Tra La La Band. It works surprisingly well.
The first song starts out with basically just Vic and his guitar. He sings in a raspy weathered voice. It’s a short acoustic song full of passion. What threw me off here is that you expect that the whole album will be like this: short, passionate, acoustic songs. The really unexpected part comes with song three, “Everything I Say,” when the backing band kicks in loud and hard. Silver Mt Zion, for those unfamiliar are an offshoot of sorts from Godspeed You Black Emperor. They have a great variety of instruments in the group, and much like Godspeed… they play grand, sweeping orchestral works. Unlike Godspeed, they have vocals. And while backing Vic, they pull out all of the stops: cellos, contrebass, choruses, Casio keyboards, the works.
Perhaps my favorite song of the bunch is “You Are Never Alone.” The premise is simple: Vic sings some very stark verses (“It’s OK, you can take a condom; It’s OK, you can get an abortion; It’s OK, you can get a quadruple bypass and then keep on, keeping on.”), and then the chorus slowly builds with first the men, then the women harmonizing and then finally everyone singing beautifully “You Are Never Alone.” It’s 5 minutes of mesmerizing beauty.
And the rest of the album continues in a similar vein: stark, humanizing lyrics and alternating spare guitar or great swells of music.
Overall, I feel like the album runs a little long (or maybe it’s just exhausting to listen to). But I can’t think of anything to get rid of; the two longest songs are actually two songs that I really like. “Splendid” is a slow building song, where you don’t realize that 5 minutes have already gone past. And then there’s “Debriefing.” The first two minutes are noisy and brash, they settle down into a short sparse verse and then crash away for two more minutes. Off and on like that for 8 minutes. Cathartic to say the least.
The strangest thing for me is that I find Vic’s voice to be similar in tone and style to Matthew Sweet. There’s a few songs where you might even think that it’s Matthew Sweet singing. But this Matthew Sweet sounds not like the pop singer of “Girlfriend” but like a man who has been beaten down by life for a little while. It’s a voice that you instantly listen to to see if you can learn anything.
I’m not sure if this will make me get any more Chesnutt discs, but I’m glad I got this one.
[READ: September 15, 2008] “Great Experiment”
Jeffrey Eugenides wrote The Virgin Suicides, a great book notable for its use of first person plural narrator (!). He also wrote Middlesex, which is on my bedside right now (and which I learned today was an Oprah pick). But in the interim I just read this short story. It’s my only exposure to Eugenides aside from Virgin Suicides, so it’s a nice change.
This story centers around Kendall, an over-educated, hyper-literate poet who is making a living working for a non-profit company. This particular non-profit was founded by Jimmy Dimon, a former porn king who apparently grew a heart and decided to publish great books at a loss. Kendall’s current assignment is to edit down Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America‘s most cogent ideas into a small pocket version called Pocket Democracy. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 