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. 

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