Review by Thom Jurek
Anybody looking for the physically visceral side of Charalambides -- as was displayed at Terrastock 6 -- should listen elsewhere. Vintage Burden is a collection of quietly psychedelic minimal guitar and vocal songs. It is among the most tender, fragile, and spiritually savvy records out there, and coming as it does from the undisputed parents of the acid folk subculture (can't call it "underground" anymore; it's too popular), that's saying something. Christina Carter has always been a skeletal poet in her lyrics, one to ask questions without worrying about answering them. The set opens with "There Is No End," a metaphysical meditation on the eternal on which Christina and Tom Carter play guitars that are so steady, slowly developing, and ever present that they sound like loops. There is a strange love triangle afoot, one that is existential and spiritual, one that is physical, projected, and yearned for, and perhaps dismissed. "Spring" has slippery, whisperingly bright textures of detuned guitar and lap steel, with Christina's vocals just hovering there, framing it all and asking for motion, for exploration, for the step in faith to encounter mystery and magic beyond death and grief. The guitar textures don't float so much as shimmer -- studied, spatial, and above all subtle -- never intruding but painting the picture the protagonist is singing about in sound. There is one long instrumental on the set, Tom's "Black Bed Blues," which comes from out of the west Texas desert and slips itself onto the train tracks to the Mississippi Delta, all through the circular force of repetition. There's this gauzy feel throughout, but his bottleneck and lap steel playing give it a weighty undertow for all its trippiness, and the chord shapes in the middle of the track -- meeting the parceled-out single notes -- are killer. It never quite screams, but lends itself the possibility throughout and gets damn close. It's answered by the near stumbling grace of "Two Birds," nearly 13 minutes long, where Christina's vocals and guitars take the tune to some strange country music wasteland before it all beings to ring and chime together, all those strings answering her voice as she sings "There is nothing for me to know/There is no need to struggle...." As the tension becomes something that unravels itself into something nearly transcendent, the tune changes and Tom plays a beautifully distorted, droning, and biting solo -- in the style of Neil Young's "Cortez the Killer" -- for a few minutes, and when the song's narrative returns and she begins singing again, it's from a place of arrival rather than traveling or observing. Vintage Burden is among the most beautiful, subtle, and moving records this band has ever made.
Charalambides
A Vintage Burden
[Kranky; 2006]
Rating: 7.7
In 2004, the Texan psych-folk group Charalambides released Joy Shapes, a haunted, captivating album that will likely come to be considered their masterpiece. Since then, the group's two primary members, Tom and Christina Carter, have moved to opposite ends of the country and largely gone their separate musical ways, though they've both remained as prolific as ever. Each has released solo works and participated in an impressive array of collaborations: Tom performing in various duos with musicians like Robert Horton, Sandy Ewen, and Marcia Bassett, while Christina released albums with Loren Connors and Andrew MacGregor aka Gown. Despite the artistic success of these and other projects, however, there is an elusive, transcendent communion the two can only fully achieve together with Charalambides, purified strains of which are manifest on the pair's meditative new album, A Vintage Burden.
As is the case with their fellow Houston native Jandek, the contents of Charalambides' vast discography can appear from a distance to be more or less homogenous. But upon closer inspection one can easily discern several distinct periods in the group's musical history, each with its own unique charms. For Charalambides, the timeline can be most obviously delineated by group membership, as they've spent two separate extended periods as a trio first with second guitarist Jason Bill and more recently with co-vocalist/pedal steel player Heather Leigh Murray, who departed after the release of Joy Shapes.
A Vintage Burden-- a striking about-face from the mystical abstractions of Joy Shapes-- appears to be the beginning of yet another new chapter in the Charalambides' ongoing, spirit-driven narrative. Gone are that album's wordless, ecstatic vocals and elliptical structures, replaced instead by some of the duo's most direct and song-oriented material since their 1992 debut Our Bed Is Green. The Charalambides' individualized sound has always been grounded in the dual vocabularies of traditional acoustic folk-blues and high-wire acid rock, and here the pair occasionally seem to be paying discreet homage to stylistic forbears like Neil Young or the Grateful Dead. Tom's exquisite soloing on the 17-minute instrumental "Black Bed Blues", seems particularly Jerry Garcia-like as it moves from arid Texas bottle-neck blues to passages of intricate psychedelia that can resemble the time-collapsed "Dark Star" collages of John Oswald's Grayfolded project.
Lacing together a quiet pulse of E-bowed guitar and lap-steel beneath Christina's plainspoken vocal, the melodic "Spring" is quite possibly the simplest Charalambides song on record-- and arguably one of the most starkly beautiful. Over the years, Christina's voice has evolved into an instrument of extraordinary depth and nuance, and throughout the album her vocals are given a newfound authority in the mix. On this track her reflective, animating lyrics ("Do not wait/ Go outside/ Sky is blue/ Full of stars") fly against the naturally lonesome grain of her delivery, providing a delicate contrast to the wintry, downcast folk of the following "Dormant Love".
Given A Vintage Burden's relatively standard space-blues construction, there's sure to be those Charalambides fans who will miss the levitational scope of the group's more free-form transmissions. But tracks like the slow-built "Two Birds" or the elegiac closer "Hope Against Hope" remain charged by the duo's singular brand of indefatigable spiritual exploration. With a sound that seems at once both spacious and intimate, Tom and Christina Carter here again showcase their seemingly innate ability to lock into a shared orbit across the darkening sky, their luminous drift scaled down to its essential, irreducible core.
-Matthew Murphy, June 01, 2006
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