Assorted Gems: Skeletons at the Feast

 

AL JOSHUA - SKELETONS AT THE FEAST  (2023)

(Disc 1)

A1 Fight

A2 Let Me Borrow Your Bicycle

A3 Cleveland Street

A4 Moving Along

B1 Sensitive Young Men

B2 I Hate to See the Evening Sun Go Down

B3 Let My Body Sing

(Disc 2)

C1 Laurel and Hardy

C2 Strange Red Afternoon

C3 Will

C4 Whisper Your Name

D1 Muffin Man

D2 Bullfighter and the Bull Go By

D3 Like a Tree

This isn’t likely to be the final time I write about Al Joshua’s Skeletons at the Feast, so I'll let myself be informal and spontaneous, just to get some thoughts down.

 

The lead single came out nine months ago, the album itself five. So I’ve been living with the songs for a while. I can hum each part as it comes and get most of the words right when I sing along. The music continues playing in my head when the album itself is over or paused. I’ve probably rehearsed/sung/shouted Laurel and Hardy, in my head or aloud, more times than I’ve heard the actual recording. Same with the first verse or two of Strange Red Afternoon, which I sing all the time to our young daughter. Ditto for the refrains of Like a Tree and Let Me Borrow Your Bicycle. Al’s cadence as he sings “I’ll be moving along” has resounded in my head thousands of times. 

But the album still confounds and surprises me. I’ve been wanting to interview Al about it, but I can’t think of any good questions: I think I’m still too deep in the music, still in its grip, still delighting in the process of living and wondering my way into it. Not that I’ve stopped delighting or learning about or being surprised by Al’s previous three full-lengths (all of which would appear in a list of my, say, top 25 records of all time), but when I think of those three, the sense I have of them, the emotions associated with them, the colors they give off, the lyrical markers and mainstays—all of that is quite clear by now; solid, intact. When I think of Skeletons at the Feast, there’s a multitude of conflicting senses and feelings and colors. It makes the album cover more apt than I originally realized. Back when Al shared it, I thought, “Hmmm, a collage. Alright.” But it is right, it’s exactly right. And I’m still in the labyrinth with the minotaur.

Regardless, here are some early (first-year) guesses or glimpses. 

There is some serious stylistic sprawl on a song-to-song level—from bold and brave (Fight, Laurel and Hardy) to unprecedently happy (Let Me Borrow Your Bicycle) and tender (Whisper Your Name), to brightly epic (I Hate to See the Evening Sun Go Down, Strange Red Afternoon, Like a Tree), to darkly epic (Let My Body Sing, Will), to capital-r Romantic (Moving Along), to liltingly ironic (Cleveland Street), to Mephistophelian (Sensitive Young Men), to cozy (Muffin Man), to jagged and weary (Bullfighter and the Bull Go By)—and yet the album coheres, for ... well, for at least two reasons. 

The first being that Al is backed by the same small band on each cut. Let Me Borrow Your Bicycle and Let My Body Sing are two very different songs, but they sure have the same keyboard/[harpsichord?] player. The loud bits near the end of Sensitive Young Men and Will are kin, despite the songs themselves being so unlike. The spare drum sound feels comfortable, at once folkish and punkish, no matter what the song. And of course there are always Al’s own rhythm guitar and voice holding the center. 

But the other reason(s) remain a mystery. I am fairly certain there is something else that binds the songs together. Six singles were released in advance (I Hate to See the Evening Sun Go Down, Let My Body Sing, Fight, Cleveland Street, Strange Red Afternoon, and Sensitive Young Men, in that order) and I was taken aback, every time, at how new and different the latest offering was. “A bag of cats,” Al called it—but demurred that somehow they had found a way not to murder each other. The double album feels cohesive, despite the different directions the skeletons go dancing away in. That was what seemed strangest to me back in mid-February, when the full album came out: that, in the context of the whole, the disparate parts fit. 

There is an underlying (often overt) theme that many songs share, which helps with the unity; but not all songs partake of it (not Sensitive Young Men, not I Hate to See the Evening Sun Go Down, not Whisper Your Name). So though the thematic links should be part of this elusive other reason, they remain only part. The secret heart is just that, secret.

Side B makes the most epic statement, which means that Disc 1 closes with grandeur. Disc 2 comes roaring in with Laurel and Hardy, much as Disc 1 roared in with Fight; but much as Side A sidestepped the fire lit by Fight and went off exploring quieter streets, so too the whole rest of Disc 2 moves quietly around the (mostly) daylit city. Based on what Al had written about the new songs on the album’s GoFundMe page (see below), I expected every song to sound like Fight or Laurel and Hardy; or maybe, in the more peaceful outskirts, like Strange Red Afternoon or Muffin Man. I thought Skipping Rope, from Anomalous Events, would be the new album’s nearest kin. But only Fight and Laurel and Hardy sound like electrified, full-band co-conspirators of Skipping Rope; and the album as a whole sounds like nothing Al has done before (even when songs originated, as my guess goes, in the writing sessions for Out of the Blue: Moving Along, Will, maybe Bullfighter and the Bull Go By—a new band and new context ease the transplanting). It makes for a strange and absorbing structure, akin to—again—a labyrinth.

And it is precisely this labyrinthine nature of the record that makes me wonder how well I’ve come to understand it at all. I like thinking that maybe I’ve only begun.

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Given the vagaries of web pages and link rot, it occurred to me that I should append a copy of the words Al wrote on behalf of Skeletons at the Feast back when the album was in its funding stage, before the words are gone forever:

Greetings friends and strangers.

Dark times are upon us again, I know. Sorrow and exhaustion surround us. The bad men are in the ascendant and seem to have us, and the sun sets on ruins of one kind or another. But it is, de profundis, from the depths, that we sing. For me this means to create. And to keep on creating until my time runs out. If I stop to dally or rest, I am wasting time and wasting the best part of myself. 

It is true that alcohol slowed me down, but I am two years out of the bottle, and I have no plans to crawl back inside. Illness stopped me in my tracks, but I have jumped out of my sick bed. Delusion and depression too have pecked at my liver, but I shall grow another and creating is how I will do it. William Blake sang, “How can a bird that is born for joy, sit in a cage and sing?” Words and tunes are upon me. Good lord, song is upon me! The dancing plague of 1518 is upon me! Fetch me down my old guitar. Roll me to that broken piano – let me hit the keys bent hell for leather. 

I’ve got 18 or so new songs and I need to get into the studio with my ragtag army and record a new ragtag album for these ragtag times. “Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid.” I have always tried to be bold with my work and now I am asking for aid. Seek and ye shall find. Ask and ye shall be given. Squeaky wheel catchee monkey. Even Indiana Jones had to take a leap of faith to get across the invisible bridge to see that old knight. 

So, is there a knot at the end of the rope? Do we have a snowball’s chance in hell? Is there a giant snake hiding in the river? Will it rain after the drought? For me there is only one way to find out. It is time, as Whitman wrote, to unscrew the locks from the doors and then the doors themselves from the jambs. I don’t mean to sound flippant, but things are quite serious sirs and madams. I am Lassie and there is trouble at the old mill. Please buy lemonade at my lemonade stand. Get in this little red toy wagon and let me pull you up and down the street - it may not seem much, but it will get you there. 

(Back to: A Personal Canon)

On Devendra Banhart

Few musicians are as near to my heart as Devendra Banhart. There may be a larger group that I would consider equals of his in artistry—a group that itself would be equal to the “top tier” group of my favorite songwriters and musicians of all time, some thirty or forty figures—but when Devendra sings into my headphones, it feels like spending time with a beloved friend. 

I could name musicians who may be further along the “unguarded” scale, like Yoko Ono and Ragnar Zolberg, but with Yoko and Ragnar it’s possible to feel, sometimes, like an intruder; they have released their songs out into the wide world, so we’re welcome to them, of course, but it does occasionally feel like (gleefully...) eavesdropping in on private matters. 

With Devendra, I feel specifically invited, and embraced as soon as I arrive; it feels like he really wants me to be there; it feels like he cares about me, like he’s looking out for me, like he means me well. Every (proper, which is to say, careful and attentive) listen is an intimate experience. It’s like Marc Bolan said in Spaceball Ricochet, in a parallel context: “Book after book I get hooked / Every time the writer talks to me like a friend.”

Devendra put out a new single last month, Twin, from September’s forthcoming Flying Wig. I’ve listened to it upward of thirty times, with growing awe. It has made me want to do a deep dive into Devendra’s back catalogue, which I do anyway once or twice a year, and it has made me want to think more about that wondrous body of work. And one of the most fun ways to think about music is to write about it.

So: here’s a personal and unabashedly besotted guide to Devendra Banhart, in the form of a ranking of his eight full-length solo albums, each of which would appear in a personal Top 100.

Ah, but first, the unranked:

The Charles C. Leary (2001) - the pseudo-debut, parts of which Michael Gira reshaped into Devendra’s Young God Records debut, Oh Me Oh My. I’ve begun poking around among the non-OMOM songs and, so far, am duly amazed.

Vetiver (2004) - by Devendra’s close friend Andy Cabic. There are two Devendra co-writes and heavy Devendra presence on guitar and vocals throughout. Just getting into this one. Oh Papa is great.

Surfing (2008) - a collaboration with Gregory Rogove. It sidestepped critical (and listener?) attention with its intentionally silly and lighthearted lyrics (or at least titles, which is what all the songs began with). Early impressions suggest that this is really excellent, a sonic companion to Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon—but I haven’t given it the kind of sustained attention it would need for me to proclaim its greatness and know what I was talking about.

Refuge (2021) - a collaboration with Noah Georgeson. Beautiful ambient material that I haven’t listened to enough.

And the ranked:

8. Mala (2013) - A modest return to a more hushed approach to his art; and the opening act of Devendra’s second decade as a recording artist, which has been very different from the first. He’s become far less prolific, for one thing. 2013-2022 saw only three vocal albums, where 2002-2009 saw six, three of which were full-scale double LPs. I wish Devendra were still putting out a new album every year, but I caught on too late for that (summer 2016). And one record every three years isn’t bad either, considering the quality of what comes. Anyway! This record is charmingly diverse, within the limits of an esoteric bedroom pop experience. I don’t go in much for electronic dance pop, a direction towards which this album makes occasional steps, but Devendra always keeps it interesting, even for a skeptic; and when he hangs about in the folk/psych corners instead, the results are typically wondrous. A Gain is one of what I think are only two songs recorded post-2004 (the other being Now All Gone on Ma) that seem animated by a spirit identical to the one that led Devendra to such strange heights between ‘01 and ‘04. 

Try: Daniel and Never Seen Such Good Things

7. Ma (2019) - Perhaps yet to rise? Ever since it came out, I’ve meant to put it into heavy rotation—the kind where I listen to almost no other albums, just the one, over and over again—but four years have passed and I haven’t yet. If I do, I know that I might uncover treasures that would bring Ma up into a higher echelon; or I might find that, yeah, it is bottom-half Devendra (there are string arrangements, after all). In any case, Is This Nice and Memorial are among his most gentle and tender songs ever, which for this songwriter, is really saying something. The whole album is fairly rustic, which I love. And, like its predecessor (and successor?), it’s all of one color, which with Devendra isn’t a given. The Lost Coast suggests a direction that could lead to an altogether new and unique corner of his world. Kantori Ongaku, Ami, Carolina, Love Song, and Taking a Page are Devendra at his easeful best. I bet he could spend the rest of his life putting out one album full of such gems every three years: comfortable, deep, provocative things: provocative in the sense that they pull thoughts, reflections, and memories from me that I’m surprised and delighted to discover were (or were still) inside me. 

Try: Now All Gone and Ami

6. Cripple Crow (2005) - has a rough “uh oh, I’m on my own” energy that occasionally means the light shining down upon the material colors it less splendidly than it deserves. Get deep enough into a full listen, though, and you’ll forget the production isn’t ideal. Shed of Gira’s watchful eye (their friendship is beautifully celebrated on I Love That Man—and, in the same year, on the Angels of Light song The Kid is Already Breaking), Devendra allows goofy and rocked-out material to share tracklist space with the haunted, beautiful, strange, earthy, and tender songs that the Young God albums would have led a listener to believe was just Devendra’s thing. There’s still a lot of these latter, especially on the fantastic vinyl-only Side D, for which I’ve made myself a (sometimes-lo fi, by necessity)digital equivalent (onto which I’ve also slipped irresistible outtake Shame); but now they’re caressed into life by a group of young players, and offset by these amazing ensemble rock pieces. Devendra’s whole songwriting spirit is in the process of morphing. It’s a cocoon album. Fascinating and fun. 

Try: Hey Mama Wolf and Long Haired Child

5. What Will We Be (2009) - The first Devendra album I heard, after stumbling on a review that I think called it a slightly psychedelic take on Jack Johnson. One listen was all it took. How could I not love——the groove on Can’t Help But Smiling (mixed by none other than Daniel Lanois) ! The multiple hard shifts in Angelika! The groove and sweetness of Baby! The ravishing beauty of the two Songs for B! The heavy riff in Rats (mixed by none other than Daniel Lanois) ! The extreme idiosyncrasy of everything post-Rats! And the fact that the album ends with a reggae song! The charms are abundant and they have not faded. Amazing production too, for the first time since 2004. It’s Devendra’s warmest and most joyous album. The track Baby once came on in a literary bookstore in the center of Zhengzhou, a city in central China, and it sounded as classic and beautiful as a Beatles or Grateful Dead song. I think any other song on the tracklist would have left the same impression. The two outtakes (Welcome to the Island, Pray for the Other Person’s Happiness) are as vital as the album tracks. 

Try: First Song for B and Meet Me at Lookout Point

4. Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon (2007) - It took me the majority of my seven-year love affair with Devendra’s music to accept the genre-hopping middle stretch of the album for what it is. I would lament that he elected to plop so many curious, ragged, and playful stylistic experiments in the center of what is otherwise a mystical, melancholic, and chillingly lovely swath of sea-mist. But, hey, it’s a double album. And the songs are weird but they’re awesome. And though Saved is a rather outrageous plunge into gospel, the lyrics are in line with the forlorn stuff on either side. And the music behind the bizarre wordplay and narrative shenanigans of Shabob Shalom is no big shift from Seaside. All these little revelations piled up and now I’m a Smokey convert. Top five Devendra—as you see. But good as the middle is, the true bliss is frontloaded and backloaded. It’s a proggy and foggy sound, a slow and rambling sound, a walk alone along the seashore. Still muddy production-wise, like Cripple Crow was, but this time the production highlights the charm and ingenuity of the songs and the ensemble playing rather than obscuring them; or maybe it just feels necessary and natural this time around, like sand on seashells. The songs at the start and the end of the album are pierced by the sadness of profound love lost: a sadness so heavy that Devendra had to run from it for a while, into the escapades in the middle: a sadness vulnerable and defeated enough to shake, or altogether break, an attentive listener’s heart. Also noteworthy for including the eight-minute prog epic Seahorse, which could have rerouted the direction of Devendra’s art altogether, if he’d so wanted.

Try: Cristobal and I Remember

3. Oh Me Oh My (2002) - Gonna default to early champion and label head Michael Gira in a moment, but I want to note first that if I could sing like Devendra does on this album, and get the same recording sound/production (the balance of guitar and voice, the conjoined clarity and warm hiss), I would sing and record every album of my own songs exactly this way. A grail album for me, sound-wise. Anyway, here’s Archangel Michael, from the relevant Young God Records page: “To say Devendra is unique is an absurd understatement. When I first heard his voice I could not believe it. His occasionally warbling falsetto is alternately bizarre, soulful, comical, gentle, and often a little frightening (listen to 'Nice People' and see if it doesn’t set the hairs on the back of your neck on end). His advanced (though often somewhat elliptical (!)) finger-picking guitar style, coupled with his wildly surreal lyrics (truly exceptional in many cases) have convinced me personally that he’s a potential major talent, and I would never use this latter phrase lightly. The 21 songs (some of which clock in at about 30 seconds) on this CD each contain their own special (psycho?) drama and immediately memorable melody - no mean feat when your instrumentation is limited to acoustic guitar and voice with only the occasional hand clap or whistle thrown in as 'orchestration'. In a popular music environment inundated with computer/electronic generated sound and sanitized ProTools mixes it’s a tremendous relief to hear something so ridiculously compelling that’s also so low tech, utterly personal, and hand made .The songs were recorded on assorted borrowed and usually broken 4 track cassette recorders by Devendra himself, in various haphazard locations around the globe. These recordings were made solely for himself, and were not intended as 'demos' in order to get the proverbial 'record deal', and they’re better for it – devoid of any self consciousness or artifice, just Devendra’s skewed, idiosyncratic, magically twisted world and imagination. My first impulse on hearing these songs might have been to take him into a studio and 'produce' a record for him, but the more I thought about it the less sense it made. There’s an abundance of hiss on these recordings, and the tape heads are often out of alignment - which adds an additional unnerving warble to many of the songs - but to me, it just makes the effect of the music even more special and intimate. I hear all kinds of references and comparisons that might be relevant in describing Devendra – from Marc Bolan’s pre-T Rex recordings, to Daniel Johnston, to Nick Drake (in my opinion some of the songs have a similar inner purity and pathos), to Karen Dalton (one of Devendra’s idols), to Syd Barrett, to, well, Tiny Tim (!)(Ok, Tiny Tim high on gasoline fumes! ). In the end, these comparisons don’t matter, because, as I say, Devendra is completely unique, and I’m really just trying to get you to LISTEN TO THE MUSIC and decide for yourself. So here’s hoping you’ll do just that. I’m confident many of you will be pleased with what you discover. As Devendra says: '…You certainly are nice people…The horse licks your skin, begin!'” Also essential: contemporaneous EP The Black Babies. 

Try: The Charles C. Leary and Surgery I Stole

2. Ape in Pink Marble (2016) - The first new Devendra album after I became a fan. I really, really wanted to like it as much as I liked the Young God stuff—or even What Will We Be—I didn’t. But I adored a few of the songs, and was intrigued by others, and kept trying. For years and years. I kept coming back to it, skeptically, carefully—and very, very slowly, the songs got under my skin. Eventually I realized how marvelous the vibe of the whole album is. Even later, I realized that Fancy Man and Fig in Leather are not stylistic twirls out of the album’s vibe, like the (then still dreaded) middle section of Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon, but a crucial and welcome part of it. The softness of the record is easily mistaken for sameyness. The spareness and restraint—for a lack of ideas. At this point, I can’t fathom how I ever heard this as anything but a grouping of some of the most beautiful and patient songs (the silences between the notes in Linda, good lord!) ever written and recorded. Intimate, kind, fearless, curious, full of longing, full of humor, full of wonder. And it has koto.

Try: Middle Names and Saturday Night

1. Rejoicing in the Hands/Niño Rojo (2004) - Someday I should try to write a proper account of what this album means to me. I listened to it almost nonstop (alongside the two Fire on Fire records, and a little bit of Big Blood, now my favorite band of all time) the summer that followed the late spring in which the woman who is now my wife and I began dating. We spent that summer of 2016 apart; she was in China, in industrial metropolis Zhengzhou, while I was in the mountains of Colorado, with no Internet access, only a landline phone. I would drive to a town forty-five minutes away where there was an Internet cafe so my wife-to-be and I could exchange messages, she staying up ‘til odd hours of the Chinese night to accommodate the opening hours of the cafe. My mother went hiking most days, and I would drive down forest roads to drop her off and pick her up at the trailheads, this album (a double LP on Young God, and exactly that in my mind too: a 32-song double album, not two separate single albums) on loop. “Mystical” is the word for its appeal. But it’s also just bursting with phenomenal songs: a songwriter coming into his kingdom: or, possessed by a spirit about to leave him for what may amount to forever, a loss that the formerly possessed has learned to make magnificent work within: anyway, it’s a miracle. Word has it that the sessions weren’t much fun for the young Devendra; future producer and collaborator Noah Georgeson said, “The image I have is of him in a sweaty shack in a swamp being forced to play take after take, getting yelled at in German until he got it right ... [with the performances] motivated by fear and anger.” But the German-spouting archangel knew what he was doing. And the arrangements Gira oversaw for Devendra’s thirty-two masterpieces are all-time marvels of sensitivity and care. This double album is the apotheosis of one human hearing endless and unimaginable beauty in the music, heart, and voice of another, and doing his utmost to allow that beauty to glow, resplendent. Easily (and perhaps always to be) in my top ten favorite albums ever, by anyone. 

Try: Fall and Insect Eyes