In the early 1990s, the Basque hip-hop/rock/hardcore band Negu Gorriak formed in the wake of a burgeoning radical rock scene, issuing a direct challenge to Spanish authority by condemning police brutality, appropriating Public Enemy’s racial politics, and singing songs in Euskara. In doing so, they adopted the musical vocabulary of American musicians but maintained a claim to local identity by educating young listeners about Basque dispossession. Whether the band thought Basque music simply wouldn’t do as a vehicle for revolutionary sentiments in the 20th century is a mystery.
According to the liner notes, the first track on Inclusions, Ben Sollee’s second solo album, is modeled on a field recording made in Basque country, and it sounds a bit like Harold Hill’s marching band, albeit with more double reeds. The reference begs some interesting but ultimately inadmissible questions about authenticity: How can one lay claim to cultural revival when so much of the music itself is new or borrowed from elsewhere?
As Negu Gorriak claimed Basque-ness by way of hardcore punk, Sollee’s classical style sets him at a similar disjuncture with the raw materials of the dispossessed tradition that makes up the lifeblood of his new album: American folk music. In this way, Sollee resembles crossover virtuosos like Edgar Meyer and Mark O’Connor (an all-star neo-folk string trio perhaps?). But rather than the latter pair’s long-form instrumental compositions, Sollee has been toiling away up there on the Cumberland plateau writing, combining, and finally delivering the most exciting singer-songwriter(-cellist) album I’ve heard this year.
Landing well above a genre bedeviled by the twin albatrosses of solipsistic whining and overwrought political grandstanding, lyrically Sollee’s songs feel well-worn yet sturdy. But they stand out chiefly because the array of melodic and textural effects available to a cellist is much different than your run-of-the-mill fingerpickin’ crooner. “Hurting” showcases Sollee’s varied playing style, as a pizzicato intro gives way to his signature percussive arpeggiations. On “Electrified,” a live favorite, he sounds like he could be tearing his cello in half. Lyrically, “The Globe” is the strongest, dealing with the inexpressibility of love. The title references Shakespeare’s theater, but the song focuses on the dude who burned it down: “Tired of the tragedies/ Tired of the death.” By the last verse, he’s singing glorious nonsense about missing “The sound of her touch/ The color of her song/ A jumble of words/ Where a space belongs.”
Still, there are a couple of those lines that, for me, break the otherwise uninterrupted illusion of the songs, like in “Cluttered Mind.” The line in the beginning, “In the other room Grandpa’s sleeping/ Nintendo comes on channel four,” is maybe just too familiar for me. Alone with a tenor banjo for most of the song, it crests upon lyrics about swarming bees, and where a lesser arranger might have cued a full band, Jacob Duncan instead scores a collection of clarinets and oboes, fluttering in and out of widely-spaced diminished chords. It’s a beautiful, understated yet expansive moment.
“Bible Belt,” another song with a gorgeous Duncan arrangement, has another illusion-busting line about shopping at Target that seems like it would probably work much better in a live setting. The song finds two lovers besieged by the guilt and suspicion of Dixie religiosity, which Sollee casually dismisses: “Everybody’s tellin’ us, ‘You better know His name’/ Every blind man needs his cane.” At his most Paul Simon-esque on “Captivity,” Sollee declares “I sprint toward freedom, how else would you move that way?” The verses trip forward with the same bunched-up rhythms that made Graceland so exciting. “Captivity” gives way to the spooky gospel-tinged “Huddle on the Roof,” a loose, slow number that treads the line between faith and doubt: “Call it tribulations/ I know my lord wouldn’t treat me this way.”
When the Scotch-Irish began immigrating to the Appalachians, they brought their music, fiddles (big and small), and a love of whiskey. As the intermingling of new elements brought us bourbon, Sollee’s classical touches and innovative playing reinvigorate a familiar genre with a touch of the highbrow. He’ll be touring through some of those same hills on a bicycle in support of Inclusions in order to show “folks that regional touring by bicycle is very manageable,” the latest in a series of creatively philanthropic gestures, including some work with Oxfam and 2010’s Dear Companion, which aimed to draw attention to the evils of mountaintop removal. Manageable perhaps for a small musical unit like Sollee and his two companions. But other singer-songwriters should heed both his migratory example and his excellent music; if a cello player can do it, anybody can.
More about: Ben Sollee
