Review: Curtis Eller’s American Circus – Wirewalkers and Assassins

Those who loved Taking Up Serpents Again, Curtis Eller’s excellent 2004 collection of banjo-driven Americana, pre-rock roots-folk and ragtime ruminations, need not tread cautiously when considering his latest, another 10-track offering dubbed Wirewalkers and Assassins. Few records this year have been as adept at mining the successes of their predecessors while still sounding refreshing and new.

Serpents is more than an appropriate comparison for the new disc. It’s almost a mirror. Eller’s carefully plucked banjo and vaguely country-western vocals still steal the show but many of the same elements surface: the walking upright bass and punctuating accordion, the cooing harmonies and rabble-rousing stompers, brushes skittering across a snare as Eller fingerpicks his way through a verse.

And, above all, Eller maintains his focus – some may say his fixation – on historical narratives and anachronisms, the way lines pleasantly blur between past and present, fact and fiction, lore and legend. On Serpents, we were introduced to Abraham Lincoln, Buster Keaton, Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh, Stephen Foster and a host of others. Now, it’s John Wilkes Booth, John Brown, Fidel Castro, Richard Nixon, P.T. Barnum and Joe Louis. (Elvis Presley returns for a second go-around.) With this mix of reference points and connotations, it’s almost less accurate to call the disc old-timey than other-timey.

Of the record’s 10 great tracks, the ones that work best are the ones that kick up some dust and get your blood flowing, whether it’s the harmony-backed choruses of “John Wilkes Booth (Don’t Make Us Beg),” the pulsing one-two, one-two throb of “Sugar For The Horses” or the borderline-frantic shuffle of the incredible “Firing Squad.” (Standouts from the more slowly paced tracks include the pedal steel weeping of “Hartford Circus Fire, 1944” and the naked, unadorned “Daisy Josephine,” a heartstring-tugger if Eller’s ever written one.)

The record’s two best tracks, though, are “Sweatshop Fire” and the album-closing “Save Me Joe Louis.”

On the former, Eller ponders the fate of the Confederacy, singing lines like “I’m going to get fucked up/ like Ulysses S. Grant” over banjo, spare percussion, wailing electric guitars and backing from a perfectly timed chorus of angelic female voices.

On the latter, a melancholy offering that takes place, in part, on death row, Eller’s brand of box-car folk slows down and the proceedings adopt an almost gospel-like hue with the addition of a moaning organ.

It’s a breathtaking end, a change of pace after a half hour of acoustic ballads and more toe-tapping fare, and another reminder that, no matter what’s come before, Eller’s still got a lot more ground to cover.

Concert Review: Sam Phillips – Sept. 12, 2008

Sam Phillips
Club Café – Pittsburgh, PA
Sept. 12, 2008

And now, 150 words on Sam Phillips’ first performance in Pittsburgh in 15 years:

Spellbinding. Opening song on electric guitar, solitary at first, distortion filtered through a cloud of gauze. An evening of shuffling acoustics and plaintive ballads, odes to sadness, tear it all down. Later, a cappella alongside piano from a warbling tape recorder.

Songs from Fan Dance and A Boot and A Shoe brilliantly accompanied by grungy guitars, Stroh violin, keys, squeezebox, parade drum, slapdash kit. One song dissolves into a perfectly timed cacophony of junk percussion, Phillips abandoning her guitar for wood-on-metal.

Opening from Shay, a local artist, but closing with pre-announced encore, appeal to an intimate audience, “One Day Late.” Thunderous applause.

Mesmerizing takes on familiar standards; the entire set sways with rain and wind outside, songs about heartbreak, fame, nostalgia. Delivery of the words sensual, like ribbons of smoke floating in mid-air, suspended. The breaks between songs peppered with jokes, dead-pan, a conversation ended too soon.

Captivating. Brilliant.

Special thanks to Bonnie Pfister and Rege Behe.

Review: David Wechsler – Vacations

Vacations is an appropriate title for David Wechsler’s first foray into the landscape of the solo artist, a record that’s as focused on traveling as a metaphor for emotional journeys as musical ones.

Over the course of 13 songs, departures and a travelogue of locations are masterfully utilized to illustrate the fragility of strained relationships and the inviting fragrance of memory. But they are also an excuse to embrace the worldliness and emotional scope those places call to mind: the tender acoustics and weepy pedal steel of “West Texas Cold Front,” the lilting piano of “The Coney Island Waltz,” the Django-jazz sway of “Salt of the Earth” and the Pacific island refrains of “We’ve Finally Come Home.”

The proceedings begin, appropriately, with “Travelin’” an acoustic aside that Tom Waits could have set to vinyl in 1973 or 1974, back before the late-night beatnik jazz of Nighthawks At The Diner. Here, Wechsler lays down a template that becomes familiar as the record progresses, a tender acoustic crawl occasionally accented with upright bass or trumpet and almost always with naked vocals that seem to tremble, quivering as if it’s an effort to speak above a whisper. He tries it with similar results on the lo-fi “Just Because” and the heart-wrenching, bittersweet “I’ve Abandoned the Details.”

But it’s far from a formula. Wechsler spices up the record, which runs just 44 minutes, with more ornate and produced fare, from Gershwin-esque ruminations with piano and strings (“Roman Road”) to addictive, toe-tapping bar-room jaunts (the gem “Golden Age”) and lush orchestral pop (“Vacation”).

But the record’s most devastating track is the one that most defies definition. An ethereal piece of melancholia, “What You Want To Hear” sets a pace, as many do, with piano and pedal steel but unfolds with some carefully placed pseudo-percussion, white noise chatter (a touch of glitchedelica) and lyrics that are as sad and elegiac as they can be menacing. “But, who am I to tell you what you want to hear?” Wechsler sings near the track’s conclusion. “Thirty-five years, that’s a long time to wait for me/ And if you waited ‘cause you’ve nothing else to do, then I will wait with you.”

The track fits neatly alongside songs that daydream about the illumination of travel, the way the world seems less scary and more inviting from the road, or about the manners and methods we employ to reinvent home and all to whom it applies.

If I were Doug Stone, the second half of the songwriting duo behind Wechsler’s gripping work with Piñataland, I know one thing. I’d be jealous.

And for good reason.