This is a marvellous debut album and one of those subtle records that gets under the skin in the best possible sense. The songs are intense and literate without being self conscious or morbid.
While thinking about how to describe my response to this music, I chanced upon a description of Samuel Beckett which seemed to have some parallels. When asked to explain one of his plays, Beckett spoke of how words were inadequate to explain anything beyond a surface meaning; he spoke of an "authentic weakness of being", a phrase that seems to fit well with the tone of this album. Even Beckett's famous closing lines "I can't go on. I'll go on" of his novel 'The Unnameable are echoed in Marco Mahler's song 'Fields' : "alive I dive into solitude again /and there's no end /cause without infinity nothing exists/ so I persist"
Quoting Beckett and these words may give the wrong impression, however. The mood of the album is far from the resigned world-weary tone that Beckett was noted for. Instead a mellow, friendly glow permeates the record making it the sort of relaxing sound many will ,not unreasonably, choose to file as acoustic chill out music.Four of the eleven tracks are gentle, melodic instrumentals that flow into the songs very smoothly making it an album that benefits from listening to from start to finish in one sitting.
The other 7 songs are full of intriguing word puzzles, containing surreal juxtapositions of imagery ("vinegar in the rain", "swimming in concrete", "ankle high culture" ,"faxing church bells") that made me think some may have come about through a cut-up writing method.
What such words do highlight - and the dilemma that Beckett also addressed - is the question of how to adequately articulate our deepest feelings into words.
Mahler's deliberately impressionistic style is one option and one which has the knock on benefit of enriching the range of possible interpretations for the listener. Since the words don't follow a linear sequence they manage to reference standard singer-songwriter topics like love, loss and identity, while bypassing a formulaic take on these subjects.
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A track title like '1's and 0's' and the peppering on references to loops, bugs and mp3 blogs made me make a link between hi-tech science and lo-fi living but this is only one of a number of different threads that could be seized upon. There's a quiet humour running through the album - I love the jokey wordplay on 'Orange Chinese Car' : "smog dogs running/smog dogs in the fog/like confused groundhogs/ they just fill up blogs".
The unhurried whispery vocal style here, and on several other tracks, reminded me of Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan. One minor reservation is that the words are so hushed that you are lost without a lyric sheet.
Marco Mahler belongs to a bunch of those 'not quite folk but we don't know quite what to call them' solo artists like M.Ward , Iron & Wine, Diane Cluck and Viking Moses who are often linked under New Weird America umbrella as a kind of default option. None of these singer-songwriters are self consciously 'weird' or freaky but their poetic sensibilities make them hard to slot conveniently elsewhere.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, lovers of Sufjan Stevens or Devendra Banhart's extended family will after all find much to admire in Marco Mahler's idiosyncratic music.
However you choose to name it, one thing is sure - this a calming record to live with and love.
Marco Mahler's website
interview with Marco Mahler on my blog
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