If you check the Constellation website for information about this album, you’ll read a short anecdote about Don and Ian’s beautiful bonding experience with Vic Chesnutt’s music. My relationship with his music is a bit more haphazard. I was introduced to The Salesman And Bernadette (1998) by a friend a few years ago but quickly dismissed it preferring to listen to Wilco or Bonnie “Prince” Billy if I was looking to sink my teeth into someone’s lyrics at all. And then The Roots released a single featuring some guy named Cody Chesnut and I started confusing the two. But now, the kid who was probably listening to Our Lady Peace and Bush when Constellation’s founding members were grooving to Vic Chesnutt’s music, has been reintroduced.
North Star Deserter marks the first recorded collaboration between Chesnutt and these local Montreal musicians, members of such groups as Thee Silver Mt. Zion, Hanged Up and Frankie Sparo, not to mention almost everyone’s contribution to Godspeed You! Black Emperor. So, naturally, this album turned out a bit different from his usual left-field country style. This collection of songs features plenty of spotlight on Chesnutt and his shy acoustic guitar but also densely arranged singing accompaniments, damp string drones, fragments of tape-recorded cacophony, and climactic electric explosions (something new for the established singer-songwriter). And when Thierry Amar’s bowed contrabass mimic’s Chesnutt’s vocal melody on “Glossolalia”, its as if two atoms collided in a centrifuge, and all the power generated from the collision was harnessed and restrained within the song.
Chesnutt’s over-annunciated singing style and rule-bending phrasing are what make his music truly unique. And every so often, the medium of songwriting becomes the message when he turns meaning inside out with alliteration scattered throughout his prose. The folk (songwriter’s) tradition naturally lends itself to storytelling, occasionally taking the forms of ballads or blues for example. However, Chesnutt gives up his opportunity to tell a straightforward story and trades it in for expressions of images, splinters of memories and descriptive poetic ramblings.
One of the highlights of this record is that just when it really counts, our humble little rock orchestra Thee Silver Mt. Zion begins to take on the mystic powers of The Bad Seeds. There is this raw energy that emerges from the womb of “Everything I Say”, the album’s third track. I am immediately reminded of Micah Blue Smalldone’s voice, but also the voice of Greenwich Village-starling Jeffrey Lewis (both are probably half Vic’s age) and these associations really help to understand the sentiment of Chesnutt’s sound.
For those of us that enjoyed Leonard Cohen’s mind a bit more than actually setting the needle to the record, Vic’s music takes some of those ideas and translates them into a wholly delightful sound. I would call it minimalist folk if I weren’t such a skeptic. Vic’s guitar is almost expendable in itself; his lyrics are way too powerful and thought provoking for six strings to be able to stand up to. North Star Deserter is not without a dangerous amount of subtleties, however it is still perhaps more easily accessible than most of Constellation’s diverse catalogue. It is a deeply enjoyable album.
- Warm
- Glossolalia
- Everything I Say
- Wallace Stevens
- You Are Never Alone
- Fodder On Her Wings
- Splendid
- Rustic City Fathers
- Over
- Debriefing
- Marathon
- Rattle
Track Listing
Similiar Artists
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Fri, 12 Sep 2008
Vic Chesnutt
: Vic Chesnutt at Balcón de las Músicas (Expo), Zaragoza Spain
