SALBE, fABLE
by Bon Iver
It’s almost 20 years since Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) released his breakthrough country-folk album For Emma, Forever Ago, a collection of personal songs born of three months’ isolation in a snowbound Wisconsin cabin, where he considered his broken life in his mid-20s.
Since then, the landscape of alt-folk, country-folk and other Americana offshoots have changed considerably. New strands emerged (Fleet Foxes, Father John Misty, Nadia Reid, Joanna Newsom), old veins were tapped again (Bill Callahan, Vashti Bunyan, the late Bill Fay) and some dark determination emerged (Ireland’s Lankum).
Vernon changed too, moving further from indie-folk than many expected. His 2011 self-titled album was musically ambitious and more alt-pop-orientated; 22, A Million (2016) brought in electronica and aggressively assertive beats, and i, i (2019) was different again with heavyweight guests (The National’s Aaron Dessner, Moses Sumney, James Blake).
Like Neil Young in the 1980s, Vernon was challenging himself and his audience, shedding folk purists along the way.
This double vinyl – the first record a 12 inch, 45rpm of three songs previously released as SABLE, the second, fABLE, a new album of the nine songs – opens with SABLE’s scatterings of self-doubt close to paranoia (“I can’t go through the motions, how’m I supposed to do this now?” on Things Behind Things Behind Things) and emotional stasis with a smidgen of self-pity (the fiddle-coloured Speyside with “maybe you can still make a man from me”).
But these give way to ambitious Cali-folk pop and laidback soul on fABLE, embellished by lap steel, samples, synths, guest vocalists (Danielle Haim) and saxophones.
All steer Vernon into contemporary, sophisticated beat-based R’n’B (Everything is Peaceful Love), busy 1970s soul (Day One) and other polished but familiar LA soul-pop territories (Walk Home), some rendered soulless through technology.
fABLE has some excellent moments – Van Morrison, Prince and smooth soulster Michael McDonald should get credit as influences – but while accepting what’s been abandoned over the decades, it’s harder to feel persuaded by what originality has been gained.
Life, Death and Dennis Hopper
by The Waterboys
Mike Scott , the chief architect of the Waterboys, never lacked ambition: he wrote of having heard “the big music” (seeing God’s creative hand in everything), celebrated and reinvigorated Celtic folk and the 2011 album An Appointment with Mr Yeats was based on poems by William Butler Yeats. So why not a concept album about photographer/actor Dennis Hopper, whose career included nasty characters in 1950s cowboy and teen delinquent films (Rebel Without a Cause, Gunfight at the OK Corral) through Easy Rider, Apocalypse Now, Blue Velvet and more?
And why not open with the scene-setting Kansas, sung by Steve Earle, then shift into a swinging orchestrated ballad Hollywood ’55?
There’s tyre-burning rock’n’roll (Live in the Moment, Baby), suave bossa nova (Andy), into the anti-establishment 1960s with the bitter The Tourist, the trailer for an imaginary Hopper biker flick (Freaks on Wheels) and …
This musical pastiche evokes aspects of Hopper’s life: Blues for Terry Southern about the great novelist and screenwriter; Riding Down to Mardi Gras; the unworthy Memories of Monterey and Springsteen with a raw spoken word part on the gritty Ten Years Gone.
Scott often pays tribute to his heroes (WB Yeats, I Can See Elvis) but the demands and diversity of this double vinyl project often escape his grasp.
These albums are available digitally, on CD and double vinyl.
