Review by Jason Lymangrover
Emerald City finds John Vanderslice moving in a more organic direction, relying less on electronic studio trickery and more on the weight of lyrics in his songs, in the vein of the Decemberists or Neutral Milk Hotel. According to a press statement by Barsuk Records, Emerald City was supposedly written as John Vanderslice dealt with legal issues due to an incident where his Parisian girlfriend's visa immigration was rejected by US Immigration. Of course, with Vanderslice it's hard to know the difference between fact and fiction. (He cried wolf once before when he told the press that Bill Gates was suing him because of his song "Bill Gates Must Die," and his lyrics are often buried so deep beneath layers of mixed metaphor that it's more likely about something else entirely -- or then again, it could be about nothing in particular.) That's the beauty of Vanderslice's music. With good art, you can take away many different meanings depending on your perspective. There is a definite reoccurring theme that alludes to events of 9-11, with imagery of towers disappearing in a cloud of white smoke, but the stories are convoluted enough that it's difficult to know positively the concept of the record. It seems to be a tale of a man who destroys the Chrysler Towers in an act of terrorism. Afterwards, the protagonist loses the police in a parade and flees to a new home where he is tormented by paranoia and eventually leaves the country to escape. He starts taking codeine to help ease his mind, but is constantly haunted by memories of the past; a neighbor bemoans the loss of her daughter in the war, a tarot card reveals a picture of a burning tower on it, and tension builds and eventually drives the main character further into seclusion where he is consumed by loneliness. In the last song (the beautifully moody, electric piano based "Central Booking"), he receives a letter from his former lover but decides not to open it for fear of giving away his secret location. Of course this take on the content is merely one interpretation of the songs' meanings and if the press statement explains Vanderslice's motivations truthfully, the record is actually an autobiographical love story dedicated to a girl in France. It's doubtfully that simple, especially considering that his last four albums were so character-driven, but it's entirely plausible. Like Pixel Revolt his melodies are still strong and unpredictable, at times sounding like Matthew Sweet performing a ballad by Neil Young, and the production is still huge and full, although audiophiles may be disturbed by the overdriven acoustic guitars on certain songs that give an unnerving sensation of blown speaker cones. It's a forgivable stylistic decision, and doesn't detract much from the overall solidarity of the disc, which reiterates once again that Vanderslice is holding the torch as one of indie-rock's most imaginative songwriters.
John Vanderslice
Emerald City
[Barsuk Records; 2007]
Rating: 6.2
After a two-year wait, John Vanderslice follows 2005's Pixel Revolt, an album waist-deep in post-9/11 dread and despair, with 2007's Emerald City, an album waist-deep in post-9/11 dread and despair. If the previous sentence makes the new album sound like it's a carbon copy of its predecessor, then you see what I'm getting at. Vanderslice reportedly wrote most of the album while trying to resolve some visa issues concerning his French girlfriend entering the U.S. The album's concluding track, "Central Booking", is the one song that directly addresses this issue, though its concluding thesis-- "looks like September won once again"-- hangs over the entire album.
As with Pixel Revolt, nearly half of the tracks make mention of, or allude to, the World Trade Center attacks, while the rest of the songs are awash in the debris and carnage from the tragedy and its aftermath. Even the album's title is a pointed reference, the "Emerald City" being a derogatory nickname for the "Green Zone" in downtown Baghdad. However, while Vanderslice's observations and commentary sounded fresh and fierce two years ago, the same essential message run through similarly sounding songs this time around rings hollow.
Musically, Vanderslice is on top of his game, deftly walking the line between tasteful and ostentatious, but even his skill in this regard can't soften the heavy-handed rhetoric. The queasy acoustic guitars on "Kookaburra" lend the song (which details the apocalyptic power of "lightning shot from the sky", a recurring theme) an unsettling air, while the lilting piano figure of "The Parade" sets a happy scene for what turns out to be another ironically bittersweet paean to the collapse of the towers (never mind an awful case of synthesizer flatulence in the bridge). Throughout the album, Vanderslice chooses to use amplified acoustic guitars, similar to what you'd hear on Spoon albums. They lend the more aggressive tracks (like "Time to Go" and "White Dove") a percussive propulsion, but these gains are undercut by the lyrics' lack of oomph.
In the past, Vanderslice could infuse both his fictional and non-fictional songs with a convincing emotional heft. This time around, he's as eloquent as he's ever been, refining and strengthening his short-story songwriting style. However, the constant referral to "lighting from the sky" and towers and drones flying by becomes as cloying and ineffective as the multiple references to 9/11 utilized by political hopefuls and pundits. Only on the album's concluding track does Vanderslice snap out of his insightful ennui and involve the listeners in what he's saying. The brief verses of "Central Booking" concerning the plight of his girlfriend and him being separated by distance and bureaucratic red tape ring truer than the purporetedly heady rush of imagery concerning a woman's dead daughter ("White Dove") or a Cindy Sheehan-esque war protester ("Tablespoon of Codeine"). The worst offender is "Time to Go", the portentous story of a wagon-train trying desperately to cross the country ("Burn the wagon wheels for heat").
Even on a short-and-sweet track like "Numbered Lithograph"-- a song that sounds an awful lot like something his last album's co-conspirator, the Mountain Goats' John Darnielle, would put to tape-- there's something missing. The idiosyncratic references that would ground the lyric sound forced, and the more immediate details ("Your cellphone shuddered and blinked/ It was your boyfriend again") don't resonate. Maybe the album falls short because of what Vanderslice claims at the end of "The Minaret": "I can see both sides, and it paralyzed me."
-David Raposa, July 24, 2007
http://www.myspace.com/johnvanderslice
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