Anomalous Events (1)

This is the first in a series of short posts about the album Anomalous Events (2020) by the great Al Joshua, one of my favorite songwriters ever, living or dead. It is his most recent work, unless I count the as-yet-unnamed band album that he is right now close to completing.

I’ve been wondering how Anomalous Events, an album full of the cryptic, the eerie, the violent and the unsettling, can feel as inviting and tender as it does. Possible reasons:

1. The spareness of the arrangements. Many songs are nothing but Al’s voice and some soft, unobtrusive background noise from the street outside his apartment. Others are voice and light percussion: a foot tapping on the floor, a hand slapped against a leg. One song, tucked away near the end of the album, has acoustic guitar. Sometimes Al is singing melodies; other times, the songs are halfway to recitals. Anomalous Events isn’t like Michael Gira summoning you to Mass on We Are Him or The Seer, allowing the seed of his strange vision to be brought to flowering life by Swans or the Angels of Light. It’s like meeting someone warming his hands over a little fire in the woods one autumn night, a storyteller, and like listening to him talk.

2. It is almost as much literature as music. It isn’t quite a spoken word release—it isn’t Robert Hunter’s Sentinel—but, unlike your typical folk/rock/whatever release, there are not a lot of musical elements to draw your attention away from the words. And while both good literature and good music—especially the kind of music heard in solitude, through speakers or headphones—are invitations to visit the innermost rooms of another human being’s heart—to see what they are like when no one else is around, as Devendra Banhart puts it—literature is the more private encounter. The words are there, and you are there, and that is all. With music, we encounter not only the songwriter or the singer, who is typically conveying the primary emotions, but the guitarist too, and the keyboardist, the drummer, the backing singers, and all of their interpretations of the song being played. Even if we listen to an all-solo affair like one of the McCartney records, or Daniel Romano's Dandelion or White Flag, we still encounter the artist in various guises: Daniel the drummer, Daniel the bassist, Daniel the lead singer, Daniel the harmony singer. When you listen to Anomalous Events, it really is just you and Al. Each song is an unedited take. Al hits “record” on his iPhone, and sings—beats—whispers—rages, then hits “stop.” And when we listen to the album, there he is. And there we are. And there, in the songs, is the story being told. And nothing else.

3. It might also just be chalked up to Al himself. His work is expressive, artful, intimate, and true. It doesn’t matter much what kind of story he is telling. The mode can be softspoken balladeering (Jump the Rabbit and Run). It can be acidic protest (Orphans & Vandals’ Metropes). It can be tense and dreamlike (Terra Firma). It can be passionate, open, inviting (Argyle Square). It can be private, quiet, confessional (the maps of time, suffering and the soul on double album Out of the Blue). It can be grounded in supernatural horror, as in Father of Flies (track 10 on Anomalous Events), a tale of rape, or murder, or demonic possession, or addiction, or all of these. No matter what it is, listening to an Al Joshua song feels like being pulled into an embrace.