JASON ISBELL
Foxes In The Snow (Southeastern)
ONE OF THE LEAST IMPORTANT, but yet in its own way best things that can be said about this seductively attractive and yet simply adorned new album from Jason Isbell – without The 400 Unit, without electric guitar, without other voices or indeed other instruments – is that it puts the definitive full stop on a long-running curse.
The curse of Unplugged is real, at least around my place. Yes, decades on from its peak, even as MTV, the network that spawned the acoustic/stripped back TV performances, long ago gave up any pretence to actually being a music channel. (Kids, ask your parents.)
MTV’s rockist tendencies were represented not just in its white-centric and boy-centric playlist but in the undoubtedly defensive position that rock ‘n’ roll was “real” while dance and electronic music (still suffering the after-effects of disco being denounced from on high, and its association with gay and black cultures), pop (attached to the denigrated young female demographic) and especially hip-hop/rap (seen as a second rate culture of theft and, obviously, black) were various forms of fabricated, and by definition secondary.
And nothing proved this more than rock artists swapping electric for acoustics, sitting atop stools in dressed-down gear, and singing meaningfully into the camera for MTV Unplugged. Hey people, if you can manufacture sincerity in New York, you can manufacture it everywhere!
For some of us, that eventually earned a reflexive response of there is nothing special in playing acoustically without bells and whistles, and anyone attempting to claim otherwise was cursed to the margins of interest. Be honest, could you really take seriously something that attempted to elevate Duran Duran, Korn and Kiss?
Foxes In The Snow, stuffed with melodies that could carry several acts for decades, doesn’t try for validation or significance. Not just in its presentation – close, bare but not empty with the guitar an equal partner, rarely slowed down yet never racing past mid-tempo – but in one of the elements that is much more exposed in this setting, lyrics.
If you come to this album looking for particular (brutal?) insights into the breakup of Isbell’s marriage to singer/songwriter/fiddler in The 400 Unit, Amanda Shires, or direct commentary on the debauched ruling philosophy in the US, against which he has made very public stands, you likely will leave disappointed. (Though you may very much enjoy a reference to Kid Charlemagne being played – badly – in a New York bar.)
While hardly throwaway – his writing is as considered, precise and descriptive as ever, as you would expect from one of the best around – bar one song, it is not overtly “relevant”. Except of course that who Isbell is and why he is, what matters and underpins relationships and politics and living, is in so much of this record. And that tells you everything.
In Gravelweed, over a ticktock rhythm and in a kind of extended apology that doesn’t shift all responsibilities (“All I know was I had to go/You know why, why why”), Isbell opens with “Wish that I could be angry, punch a hole in the wall/Drink a fifth of cheap whiskey and call and call and call/That ain’t me any more baby, never was to tell the truth/I just saw it in a movie and thought that’s what I was supposed to do”.
If the old ways of coping have long been abandoned, where to now? Do present circumstances invalidate past declarations? “Now that I’ve lived to see my melodies betray me/I’m sorry the love songs all mean different things today,” he sings with an edge but not the full thrust of emotions. That’s not his way, that excess of any feeling: it’s always felt, for he isn’t isolated from sentiments, but like someone who has learnt to curb the reactionary responses – in his case, drinking – that once sprang naturally, control matters.
The control slips only once really, and it is in the one song that does not appear to obscure or deflect from his personal upheaval and the shitshow more widely: True Believer. It begins with a gently rolling guitar riff that doesn’t push, even as he sings “Take your hand off my knee, take your foot off my neck/Why y’all examining me like I’m a murder suspect”. This is conversation, however loaded, right?
Memories stick around in a town full of them, and there’s something good in that as a true believer, but the thin bandage over this wound falls away pretty quickly, even as the gentle guitar remains steady, the suggestion of firmness in the strumming as much in our imagination as his voice. “All your girlfriends say I broke your fucking heart, and I don’t like it/There’s a letter on the nightstand I don’t think I’ll ever read/Well I finally found a match and you kept daring me to strike it//Now I have to let it burn to let it be.”
Yeah, that does leave scorch marks.
It should be acknowledged that while bemoaning the lauding of unplugged recordings for just being unplugged, it’s entirely possible that I’m falling for this record for qualities which aren’t that much different, or that much less open to manipulation of the listener. Is this better than the 400 Unit albums? No, not really, but it can sit in their company. Whether in the light trot and fair romance of the title track, the nimble picking and worked metaphors of Wind Behind The Rain, or the mountain air frolic of Ride To Robert’s, there is a casual air to many songs that suggests a lighter load than the usual Isbell music. But if the rock is deeper/acoustic is more meaningful trope is a dangerous error, mistaking brighter presentation for easier paths is just as bad.
As the James Taylor-ish (but frankly, better than that comparison allows) Eileen shows, there are few writers around at the moment who could challenge Isbell for the ability to capture characters in sketch form and at the same time tell us so much that we suspect we are seeing everything. And this while pairing them with tunes that hold their ground, then hold you. Plugged or unplugged.
READ MORE
Foxes In The Snow is out today.
Comments