k.d. lang - Watershed

Watershed

k.d. lang

Nonesuch, 2008

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This review will contain no carefully constructed dissections of politics, no deconstructions of historical signifiers and their relation to aesthetics, no long discussions of past performances, no analysis of metatext or paratext, I won’t talk about the packaging of the album (though buy the deluxe edition, because it is beautiful, and contains lovely ready to be framed photographs of the delightfully, erotically, androgynous ms lang). This makes it difficult for me, because all I have is the text, but oh what a text it is.

Start with the production: it’s a bed of Bacharach strings, baroque pop from the less fashionable end of the 60s—but there is nothing kitschy about their presence here. They exist as a mannered pop gorgeousness for its own sake, a masterful craftswoman figuring out exactly what she and the band can do, with a marimba, with a banjo, with steel drums, with a piano, or a guitar, with her own unique voice, and as a result the studio itself bends to her unending well.

That voice croons, queer and languorous, dripping with bourbon, releasing honey and smoke. Even when the words speed up, when the voice becomes slightly crisper, to enunciate a clever line or a hard edged feeling, there is still attention paid to how it sounds, like all the great torch songs, she knows when a line has to be embers, when a phrase has to be smoke, and when a few notes need to rise in a bonfire.

There is nothing simple in the emotions here—even the simplest sentiments, like "I will make you happy baby, I will make you smile" are followed by lines like "I will drive you crazy"—then she waits four beats, and slithers out the punchline—"once in a while"—crazy with what, with lust, with loss, with mystery, or with something deeper, that the chorus contains the line "love with out reason/is the hardest love to find" is the most erotic delivery in recent memory, but it is not the eroticism of penetration, nothing and no one is being penetrated here.

She has created the anti-Exile On Mainstream---there is nothing filthy or damaging or broken here, it fills the listener with undulating waxing and waning fluids. Hearing the album is to drown in the rapturous pleasure. she overwhelms you. No one will want to spend the night together after Sunday, four minutes about how she waits, for the entire week, just to spend a couple of hours "naked in your room" (and when she sings that line, she goes up an octave, then glides down to the original key, so that she is alto when she is naked and almost tenor when "she is all consumed")

That the album seamlessly, radically, matches lovemaking to consumption, longing to reward, desperate aching to orgasmic pleasure, dissipation to self-control, makes it the paragon of adult sophistication. This culture of adolescents attempting adult lives, and adults desperate for their adolescence, it is useful to be reminded that there are still grown ups doing grown up things, and having grown up emotions about them—emotions that can barely be discussed in words, emotions that take paragraphs of give and take, emotions that are built perilously towards mysterious crescendos. As she sings in, Flame of the Inspired, "I spent a life time carving out my fate, things I like, things I hate, my very nature is to criticize, to cut myself down to size, on the cusp of compromise, in living hell I slip and fell"—sung in the exact tone that Frank Sinatra perfected in All Alone, but more butch. 

She has worked and lived, for this album to sound like it should. She has song torch songs, and she has had her heart broken, I hope that this gets the audience that it deserves, or any audience at all. She goes from strength to strength, and even throw away sound track singles were exciting, now that we have an album of her own material, it proves how vital her writing is, that her singing was much needed should never have been in doubt.

Anthony Easton

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