![]() And from those songs let me corral a few snatches of meaning. Claiming Krautrock and shrugging off the departed Dan Bejar, he generates 11 soaring new pop songs, which in some abstrusely Krautrock way are sparer than the 13 on Brill Bruisers. The New Pornographers: Whiteout Conditions (Collected Works/Concord) 12: Carl Newman's ad hoc outfit could be the greatest band in the world if he didn't write so obsessively about purveying their tune-porn, but he'll settle for the status he's got.But they're obliterated by the immediacy and detail of his loss, of his living yet inexorably transmuting love for his dead wife, of their living baby daughter, of the modest domestic arrangements he can hardly bear to recall. I love you." Such autobiographical conundrums are one of this album's achievements whether Elverum is in control of them or not. But what choice did he have if he hoped to expiate the grief that consumed him? And given that, what can it mean when he ends the same song: "I don't want to learn anything from this. It's so spare and bleak that it took me a lot longer than a week to notice that Elverum had laid a forthrightly bassy thrum underneath his finger-brushed acoustic guitar, arting death up after all. And then there's this, which begins with a very biographical version of gently depressive Puget Sounder Phil Elverum shakily observing: "Death is real / Someone's there and then they're not / and it's not for singing about / It's not for making into art." The someone is Elverum's wife of 13 years, ghosted away from her sickroom by cancer exactly a week before the song was recorded. Elverum & Sun, Ltd.) 15: It's essential and not all that difficult to distinguish the persona who sings the song from the person who created both the song and the persona. ![]() ![]() Mount Eerie: A Crow Looked at Me (P.W."Every day seem like murder here." "Ain't no heaven, there ain't no burnin' hell / Where I'm goin' when I die can't nobody tell." "Come on mama on the road again." A ![]() And he justifies the ongoing mystification of Blind Willie Johnson's hummed, moaned, postverbal "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" by closing with it, as if to prove that, in the end, the message of this music is beyond words. He blends in the warhorses-in-waiting "'Tain't Nobody's Business," "Walk Right In," and "Sitting on Top of the World." He welcomes Mattie Delaney's polished, still obscure "Tallahatchie River Blues" and Geeshie Wiley's eerie, now canonical "Last Kind Word Blues" into an assertively male canon. Bernard MacMahon defies convention by beginning with an anachronistic culmination-Robert Johnson's mythic "Cross Road Blues" was cut in 1937, well after country blues's 78-rpm flowering. But conceptually and song for song, these 17 clear, rich, cannily sequenced Duke Erikson remasters-Delta guys mostly, with hokum bands and two Texans mixed in for extra flavor-leaves them in the dust.
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