Career-defining opuses by humble musicians seem like such good ideas at the time, I bet. But humble follow-ups see fans and critics asking tougher questions than they used to. Just ask The Magnetic Fields, whose 69 Love Songs simultaneously elevated the group from cult status and doomed their subsequent discography to meaning-of-life scrutiny. Paleo — a.k.a. Illinoisan David Andrew Strackany — outdid the Fields by a factor of six with 2008’s The Song Diary, which is exactly what it sounds like. (By the way, you want to talk about humble critics trying to do background research? And the sound of their jaws hitting the keyboard?) Reputedly, living in the thick of The Song Diary’s 17 hours is more like passing by a hugely talented street musician on the way to work every day, or listening to an extremely consistent folk radio station. Artists this prolific make me think of the kid at the end of Stephen King’s 1981 short story “The Jaunt”: technically young, but infinitely old in the ways that count. One has to wonder what a 13-track album even means to this guy anymore.
For my part, I’m just as happy not to have owned and loved The Song Diary, because I can recognize with a clear head that A View of the Sky is a darn good album. It’s also surprisingly carefully arranged for a guy who’s used to playing mostly out of his trunk: plenty of organ and xylophone lace the smeary electric- and acoustic-based songs. Mostly, the production remains subdued, but the chunky title track is closer to the sort of ramshackle lo-fi you’d expect from a guy long past seeing songs as chords. It hobbles to life on an off-beat and a mumble, and for its statement of purposelessness — “There’s nothing out this window but a view of the sky/ Empty and old and a thousand miles wide” — splits into a jarring mariachi horn line. “Good Blood” consists of muted guitar in arbitrary, tightly-wound clusters and lives for the moment when it breaks into full, loose chords.
The instruments that sag a little are the most successful in conveying a song’s gravity; the heavier songs render a cute ditty like “Me And Mabeline” trivial. The instrument that sags the most, however, is Paleo’s consistently hoarse voice, like a tobacco-parched Will Oldham. His words bump elbows like they’re being written on the spot; the tone ranges from parenthetical to clamorous to faintly ridiculous (see: the falsetto in “World’s Smallest Violin” and “The Password”). Suffice to say, I love how the man mixes vocals. There are two of him in the same cramped room, always just barely out of sync with each other. The album’s most addictive songs come when Paleo is in step with his own charming brand of thin, amateur drumwork, like he is for “The King James Fakebook.” Percussion gives his voice a bone to fall off of. Along with some feedback stitches that sound both homespun and esoteric (think glass rims), the pant-leg patter sustains the album’s centerpiece, “Hello and Behold.” At over five minutes, it’s the album’s longest song, but it wisely uses the time to grate the punny title into little cathartic shreds.
For being minutes from vapor, these songs are pretty durable. I quickly realized that Paleo’s music doesn’t require much analytic matchmaking with moments or moods. He has a CouchSurfer’s wisdom about the inseparability of art and life, and it’s that quotidian chug that makes his songs such a warm addition to any listener’s life. A View of the Sky is not The Song Diary, but there’s something noble about a standard album that seems to operate on the same parasympathetic principles. If this is a comedown, it’s a pretty inspiring one, and if it’s a cross-section, we should be thankful he dwelt long enough to assemble it.
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