Rating: 8/10
This review inaugurates a new form of analyzing records. As I dig into my fresh memories of David Shultz’s self-titled record, it’s John Frusciante’s free Internet album From the Sounds Inside that’s playing in the background. Since they move in an analogous wavelength, I assumed there would be no problem establishing an ideological bridge between the two. Both write confessional tracks with a penchant for improvisation and they always avoid the endless boogie clichés.
This record is a logical progression from Shultz’s more proactive work: forty songs in his first two years as a solo act. For this, he chalked up ten hard-boiled tracks that take visual and aural quotes from each other. The result is an instrumental finesse that could only be found in the sadistic comfort of a bargain store. His finger-picked guitar style on tracks like "How It Was", "Abyss" or "Grey Away" takes its cues from the Pelt’s canons, but the stamina provided by the distensile bass is purely his own, or Marcus Shrock’s for that matter.
Backed by one-chord ruminations, "Fisher King" possesses a trait that may stymie a full comprehension of David Shultz: its noirish atmosphere unplugs the old amps and leads you to drony meditations that then drop out of sight, just as "All the Same" unleashes its receded intimacy. In this particular aspect, Frusciante does it better, constantly taking the temperature of the listener and never allowing him to get lost in the drowsiness of microtonal perception.
To wrap this album up, the guitar in "Blue Jay" is almost percussive, backed by lines like "Oh how I burned my eyes, I tried to stare at you anyway", which bleed into the great finale that is "Of All the Things". Always loath to acknowledge that acoustic music will save the universe, I have an occasional fondness for college folk and lustrous pop craftsmanship. There is a lot to be said about Shultz’s humble, spartan voice, but it’s really incautious to reduce this record to his vocal delivery.
In Shultz’s music, arrangements aren’t merely illustrative. In little more than half an hour, he shows how to grow cotton from apparently obsolete echo boxes and seemingly sludgy, crap beats. I’m not sure who’s the disciple and who’s the master, but John Frusciante and David Shultz are kind of replicating each other’s footsteps. Only, they don’t know how.
http://www.lostatsea.net/review.phtml?id=131640451044609c6242f64
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário