- Label: 'The Leaf Label'
- Genre: 'Pop'
- Release Date: '26 May, 2012'- Catalogue No: 'BAY 83CD, BAY 83V, BAY 83E'
Our Rating:
There was a time when rock and roll musicians invited orchestral arrangers to add some grandeur or romance to their riffage. Rock fans of the 60s and 70s had been avid cinema goers and even without any "classical" education their musical palettes were awash with orchestral sounds. String arrangements were natural in all kinds of pop and rock. John Barry and George Martin were among the wiling accomplices. Rock operas didn't set the world alight, but they were a logical extension.
Then the 80s launched out into art music, drawing more breath from the subliminally orchestrated film and television scores that were always there in the background. Since then cellos (in particular) have become a normal feature of indie guitar bands and youth orchestra friends regularly pop up on diy albums and at special gigs.
But now we're in an age where pop and rock natives have grown up with access (at least) to music academy education and the means to assemble otherwise impossible orchestras. Multi-instrumentalism comes a as standard and producer/composers can create intellectually demanding symphonies on a laptop. Such people can make pop songs that sound like a 60s film score with all the sultry allure of the cheap pop song as a natural part of the deal. So far, so pastiche.
However, when the academy is understood as a dynamic field in its own right and this well-informed popular music is done in the same creative, collaborative (and hardworking) spirit that created the old elite cannon we have some real magic. Leeds' Matthew Bourne might be a good example. New York's Moondog would count as an early pioneer. Jazz, obviously, is also implicated. Scott Walker has stalked the territory with great success. Stage and film musicals are implicated.
Eventually we get to 30 something Seattle-based producer/arranger/polymath JHEREK BISCHOFF. His many projects are already well documented. Xiu Xiu and Parenthetical Girls are the sorts of name that establish the credentials. This album, COMPOSER, is fresh as a daisy and ready to absorb a lot of your time and attention. The scale of the canvas combined with obsessive detail in parts make it more than exciting.
Constructing the sounds was a painstaking assembly of separately-recorded parts, some played by Bischoff himself, others added by collaborators as individual tracks, "phoned-in" if you like, or collected by Bischoff on his travels to their territories. Amazingly, the result sounds bright and organic.
Track 1 is a prelude, a 46 second curtain-raising of concert strings. It is followed in grand form by a swaying tune with David Byrne singing "Eyes", in his lounge-lizard best suit to a five star hotel quartet with a ukulele on the street outside and a strict-tempo drummer on the inside. Pass the pastis, m'sieur! A perfect aperitif.
"The Secret Of The Machines "(with Caetano Veloso & Greg Saunier) then ventures into unfamiliar instrumental textures There are disrupted strings, a tampered-with bass-drum whoomping like a loose sail and scatterings of woodwind in the rigging. Wisps of classic melody clothe it all and Steve Reich seems to lurch in with variable tempo loops. Such restless changes are part of the underlying dynamic of the whole album. Get your ears retuned, get your speakers as big and rich as you can and let yourself wallow in the remaining tracks.
"The Nest", with Mirah Zeitlyn and Paris Hurley is a more conventional chanson of very French demeanour. The smoky vocal and the subtle, ubiquitous ukulele give it intimacy and distinctiveness.
"Blossom" (Jherek Bischoff with Nels Cline) opens with lean-back cinematic grandiosity. Half way in a solo harp provides a knowing bridge into a soundscape suggestive of filmi music with tablas and exotic drama. Clever stuff.
"Your Ghost" features Craig Wedren singing a beautiful and richly orchestrated waltz of tears and anxiety.
"Counting" (with Carla Bozulich) stays in three four chanson mode. It's probably the most conventional piece on the album and it delivers a grand climax.
"Young and Lovely" (with Zac Pennington & Soko) nudges me to imagine a Jacques Brel/Brian Molko film song, just right for a Summer excursion into youthful optimism and liberty, with roughly stolen identities and imagined lifestyles. There's a sweet video:
"Insomnia, Death And The Sea" (with Dawn McCarthy) comes in like John Cale from 1967 and proceeds with the drama of Brecht. It's a magnificently overblown closing to an album that positively glows with hubris and vaulting ambition. Magnificent stuff.
