Experience counts for a lot these days. What better way to make music that "speaks" to an individual's multifarious needs and ordeals than by living those struggles yourself? The music industry knows this too: how else to explain its incessant insistence on belching out the same tired old clichés of "old before his/her years", "despite his/her relative youth", "a voice that belies his/her age" and so on? But what if the record bods and talent scouts stopped scratching around in the latest hip bars, desperately seeking a fourteen year old with the cigarette-stained vocal chords of a fictional love-child of Tom Waits and Bonnie Tyler (because weezy mumblings = experience)? Well, they might find the perplexingly monikered Chocolate Genius Inc., aka Marc Anthony Thompson, a Panama native who's ambling career has seen him grow up in California, decamp to the teeming metropolis of New York, play acoustic guitar for Bruce Springsteen's Seeger Sessions Tour and collaborate with individuals such as Van Dyke Parks and Meshell Ndegeocello.
But with posters for a headline gig at Paris' hardly shabby Boule Noire (artists set to play there in the next few weeks include Biffy Clyro - no strangers themselves to the long-hard slog - Feeder and, err, Electric Six) and a release on One Little Indian, a career which has previously flitted on and off the radar (although a gushing review for 1998's "Black Music" from notoriously masturbatory and self-important music website, Pitchfork, must still keep Thompson warm at night) appears to be resurfacing once again, blinking in the autumn sunlight and the blazing mega-watt gaze of the 21st century's music industry. So can the latest offering from Thompson, whose solo career began in a world troubled by the FRG, the GDR and NATO, long before our modern-day concerns of MP3, OGG and iLife, leave its mark on a scene now dominated by bizarre haircuts and chain-smoking teenagers that has already changed enormously since 2005's "Black Yankee Rock"?
It's important to note that, in amongst all this label change, new marketing and European tours, "Swansongs" remains a decidedly lo-fi affair, almost like it's a somewhat reluctant Thompson who's reappearing after five years out: opener "She Smiles" emerges out of a hazy soup of white noise, background fuzz and nearby chatter, as if the listener is tuning in to a distant and faint pirate transmission of the frontman's personal thoughts. Despite both Thompson's and Chocolate Genius's maturity and major label releases on Warner and V2 Records, the sense of (re)discovery is still palpable. A touchingly warm and dusty track of soft, deep-seated longing ("there's a bird singing at my front door/and I wish that he'd sleep a little more/'cos there's nothing to wake up for/till she smiles"), it blossoms briefly before dissolving into the soulful patter of "Enough For You". Languidly measured and effortlessly cool, the beautifully understated orchestration and delicate piano licks meld with the scratchy percussion to deliver a nonchalant slice of smooth bar-room swing.
The elegant, understated keys prove to be one of the album's defining leitmotifs, reappearing on the gentle confessional of "Kiss Me" - which opens with sweet interweaving male harmonies and concludes with the half-alluring, half-pleading line "Just kiss me" - and on the magnificently twitchy foul-mouthed hobo-folk of "Lump". On the latter, a beat-up song that seeps with a world-weary disgust at the universe or - more probably - an individual ("You fucking communist/you fucking thrift-store shopper/you fucking dirty skirt/you ain't fucking Babe Ruth"), the disinterested piano twinkles in the background, almost a semi-forgotten after-thought, as Thompson lethargically but obsessively drawls "Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday/all the same/Thursday/Friday/Saturday/I curse your name". The bristling anger, tangible but exhausted, fades out with the song as Thompson murmurs "Monday" to himself, like a strung-out, half-comatose junkie in the gutter. Its irrational and misdirected rage stands out in stark contrast to the dignified but spent submission of "Ready Now", but nevertheless fails to hide the fall of a broken man, muttering and spewing empty resentment into the swirling wind. Much to Thompson's credit, the listener's overriding feeling in the face of this overwhelmed resignation is not one of antipathy but pity.
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Out of this rippling cauldron of loathing and ennui comes "Polanski", described by Thompson as "a song about exile". A piano ballad of a different sort, it drifts along mournfully, haunted by an almost imperceptible steel-guitar, as Thompson relates a departure of sorts, amid penetrating acceptance of his fate, whatever it may be: "Praise your Lord/but not for me/'cos I've been living/with the devil's knees".
This sense of melancholic restraint (excluding "Lump" and the heartbreaking gospel-wake of "When I Lay You Down") reaches its zenith on the sparse organ trudge of "Ready Now", an album closer so lethargic that the album almost finishes before it. Seemingly lacking in purpose and suggestively ironic in pace, it soon becomes apparent that the protagonist's "readiness" is in fact for the final journey that humankind can make: "It's too late, the damage is done/and I am too tired to run/I'm ready now".
Thompson has rather cryptically described "Swansongs" as the "fourth album in a trilogy" (the aforementioned "Black Music", and "Black Yankee Rock", separated by 2001's "GodMusic"). Listening to it reveals exactly what he means, for these eleven tracks offer a final, closing chapter, a musical goodbye in honour of "the end" in all its many forms. Even quirks such as including the voice of his father, who died during the album's writing, on the ethereal sound collage of "Mr. Wonderful" could have been mawkish and inappropriate. In Thompson's careful hands, however, it becomes an eerie but compassionate tribute to the man and, more generally, the human condition.
Enigmatic announcements like Thompson's album description and WNYC's branding of Chocolate Genius Inc. as the artist's "reclusive, self-important alter-ego" can sometimes point towards barely listenable twaddle or unbearably overblown vanity projects. Fortunately for the world (and this reviewer's sanity), it's nothing of the sort. Indeed, for what sounds dangerously like pretension on paper turns out, on CD, to be gloriously understated, touchingly heartfelt and, at times, searingly raw. This is one experience that you won't want to miss out on.
Chocolate Genius Inc. on MySpace
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