From
the
Great American Songbook is the archly titled second collaboration
between Tom Carter and Christian Kiefer. Is From the Great American
Songbook an album of cover songs? A 20th century retrospective
on the folk form? A paean to the American blues tradition? Yes
and no. It’s all original material, it has trappings of
folk and blues but the guitars are as often as not heavily processed,
the songs are with respect to structure generally post-modern.
Improbable juxtapositions are From the Great American Songbook’s
leitmotif. The fifth track has the baldest conjoining of styles.
It starts with slow, low, slightly dissonant piano chords and
burning peals of lead guitar. Add desultory, skittering free-jazz
drumming with ample cymbal rattling and frantic full-kit fills
plus some sinister, oleaginous, low-end slicks of synthesizer
and the result is a numinous drone epic. But before long the piano
resolves into an ebullient ragtime refrain and the guitars blaze
and whine more violently and the drumming gets more and more insistent.
Static rages and screams and the counterpoint with the jolly,
slightly drunken, piano is piquant at first and then fascinating
as it stretches on and on.
On the seventh track, a 12 minuter, we get tonal poetry, part
Phil Niblock, part Terry Riley, lots of organ and endless, gently
oscillating, electronic haze; a piece of pure textural classical
minimalism. The reference points include Ashtray Navigations,
Vibracathedral Orchestra, Birchville Cat Motel and Phillip Glass.
Drum clatter fitfully arrives and departs, faintly, distantly,
unable to usurp the blissful raga drift. Treated guitar bends
in and out of the organ cloud, always gently swelling, and adds
chilly melody to the thick, billowing blanket of buoyant whirr.
It’s musical solvent to dissolve reality into.
The rest of the album is blithely Protean. The first track e.g.
is dark post-rock hewn from two electric guitars that reaffirm
the power of the form. The volume difference between the quiet
bluesy-introduction and the forceful climax is achieved without
turning any volume knobs, Kiefer and Carter simply play harder.
The song is stately and beautiful. The third and fourth tracks
add mesmeric, poignant early folk singing in falsetto. The lyrics
are affectedly simple, generally rhyming couplets that render
laconic, tragic narratives (e.g. dying for love). Both are long,
totaling about 19 minutes, but use essentially conventional structures.
Banjo and meandering guitar adorn the fourth track, which recalls
Gravenhurst strongly, albeit with long, lovely digressions to
Kiefer and Carter’s conferring instruments. The resemblance
to Gravenhurst (viz. Diane) is reinforced by the song’s
desiderated woman, Polly, whose name is plaintively and tenderly
sung throughout. As an homage to an old idiom it is nice, but
it loses momentum over its eleven minutes. I could listen to the
hushed, lovelorn calling of “Polly, pretty Polly”
for hours, but coming on the heels of the previous track the homogeneity
of the two songs’ timbre saps its effect somewhat. (WMD)
For fans of: John Fahey, James Blackshaw, Gravenhurst,
Sir Richard Bishop, Vibracathedral Orchestra, Terry Riley
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