After O’Rourke and David Grubbs quit making music as Gastr Del Sol, in 1998 after Camofleur, I followed them a little bit but not that much. Grubbs was on a Pauline Oliveros album which I liked but didn’t attend to enough to love, O’Rourke did a couple of solo albums which were jokes inside a space I never entered, and so forth. I knew that O’Rourke was involved with Wilco and Sonic Youth, but there, too, I was not really paying attention.
People apparently loved this album back in 2001, and it is really amazing, but it feels just a little bit underdone in 2008. Maybe it’s simplicity is its beauty.
—note, as of May 2009, this album is back in print, so buy it if you like it
Well, this album induces melancholy in me in so many ways.
I have to admit that I envy Will Oldham, travelling to Iceland and recording deep records with Bjork’s sound engineer. Having good friends who go to fairly great lengths to help him realize such an individual, peculiar album. Making so many records in his career that frankly I never knew where to start - this is the first of his albums that I’ve really listened to. I don’t understand why I envy him and not Bill Callahan, say, or Tom Ze, people whose music I have a longstanding connection to.
Then there’s the lyrics. Putting aside his subject matter for a bit, just reading the lyric sheet makes my head hurt. It’s like reading Hegel - each word relates to its immediate neighbors in a clear way, but as you move to the phrase, sentence, and verse the sense gradually dissipates until you have to start all over again at a different phrase. It actually makes more sense when just listening, because it almost turns into a list of related words, which create meaning without clearly representing it, a sort of Cubism. I suppose it’s poetic, but at bottom the poet has to guarantee his readers that he has discovered the most simple way to express an idea so insightful that simplicity is redefined.
The content expressed by the lyrics is just heartbreaking. Will Oldham seems to see love and mutual destruction as coextensive. Even “Lay and Love”, which mostly works as a straightforward but very careful and complete love song, has the line
From what I know you’re terrified, you have mistrust running through you, your smile is hiding something hurtful, it makes me lay here and love you
I often think about Leo Strauss’s “Persecution and the Art of Writing” when considering obscure song lyrics, that contradiction and nonsense are ways of encoding heterodox ideas. I may as well also think of R.D.Laing suggesting that the insane are making their best effort at a compromise of contradictory necessities. Here the opacity of the surface just seems to reinforce the darkness inside. If you watch the video for Cold & Wet, you can see a layer of distressed gauze impregnated with christmas lights laid over the top of the opaque darkness of the song - very creepy.
Oldham’s voice, too, is heavy. It sounds as if he’s asleep and begging the rest of the music to stop making noise and come to bed.
