Like most great artists, listening to John Vanderslice one is unsure as to whether he is a madman or a genius. He’s certainly pushing the boundaries of what’s acceptable in song-writing. There are precious few, if any, songs willing to include references to Guantanamo’s detention centres, let alone to carry lines like “I’m a guard in Guantanamo, I bring the prisoners in, the hoods come off and the torture slowly begins”. And it’s not for shock value – the lines are rythmic, menacing and counterpointed by a lush, synthesized soundtrack. Vanderslice is interested in layers, musical and narrative – and so it’s natural that his themes are the dark seams below the surface of America.

You’d be hard pushed to find another song-writer so keenly aware of the indivual constituent parts of a song, and how they interact to become one. There are songwriters who focus winningly on their lyrics, ensuring complexity, rythm, and imagery are all present, sung over a 2nd rate backing band – and if the lyrical content is good enough, we applaud them. There are others who are willing, or forced through a lack of poetic skill, to tack on an irrelevant lyric to a song that has melody, dynamics and spine-tingling arrangements – rock n’ roll is, after all, not poetry. Vanderslice, though, seems unwilling to slack off on any of these parts – which is why his songs are so good, and perhaps why they have received so little attention thus far.

The opening track Pale Horse sets the scene. A jerky guitar fighting against tin pan drums, above which Vanderslice’s voice is plaintif. Trumpets and mysterious sounds join in as the song builds pace. This is a nervous and unsettling song, melodically, rythmically and lyrically. The song builds in tandem with the lyric, the chorus of which informs us:

“rise like lions after a slumber

in greatly unknowable numbers

free the blood that must ensue

we are many and they are few”

Interestingly though, the rythm and melody bottle out in the end, as if unwilling to coalesce with the bloodshed. Vanderslice is innovative and a risk taker, but he also has a clear-cut pop sensibility. Dissonance and aural anarchy have no place on the record – for which this critic is grateful. After Cage, and perhaps Reed, too many ‘artists’ feel that to be serious you have to be out of tune.

White Plains starts with a wholesome melody and straight forward beat, which any teen-drama could co-opt for an emotive soundtrack. The story, though – and Vanderslice is very much a narrative songwriter – is caught between manifest destiny and apocalypse now. The opening lines set the tone:

“on the sunday after the mason dance

it�s the one day I can remember when

I felt so pure and really at peace with myself

I was in love, the sun sang down victorious

but the truth is I have no faith in happiness

it turns to fear, draws the devils near

so I jumped the fence

and went out west
“

Amidst the paranoia, drugs, and torture that circulate liberally throughout the record, the songs stumble back repeatedly to that source of stability – the family. But the family on this record is very much that of Philip Larkin, as much as bible-belt decency. They fuck you up, most alarmingly on one of the stand-out tracks They won’t let me run, which tells us the story of a wayward son, driven to run because of the oppressive proximity of his family, or perhaps it’s something else entirely. All we know for sure is that it ends in tarantino land:

“I got dead drunk

and packed up the pickup truck

got way out of town, I thought

but sheriff tracked me down

they dragged me home

and the family sat me down

they kept me cuffed up and they roughed me up and said:

�we�ll never let you run.�”

.

It’s not all an unqualified success. For such a determined songwriter, it’s a surprise that the most stripped back and solo (in the sense of the least amount of collaborating musicians) song, My family tree, is also the one that doesn’t quite add up.

Hats off, then, to the ensemble at work on a record that has an impressive list of instrumentation at work: viola, cello, vibraphone, moog, metal tube, water glasses, and various studio trickery and gadgets. For the most part all adding to the picture, rather than simply being dragged in as extras in a hollywood crowd scene.

Vanderslice writing in Pitchfork magazine about Radiohead’s Hail to the thief declared, “There is so much beauty and invention in these recordings that just processing the confounding textures and unknowable landscapes is a creative act. A case in point: underneath the opening drum beat of �There there� a washed cymbal sounds a continuous C#. After a few measures, bass and detuned guitar establishes the key of Bm, setting the washed tone a whole step above the tonic, giving us one of the most dissonant and tense intervals, a 2nd. This harmonic confusion continues throughout the song, and reinforces the terminally bleak tone of the lyrics.” This, perhaps more than all my ramblings, gives an idea of how thoughtful Vanderslice’s approach is.

It’s a bonus then that most of the songs have hooks big enough to land the least attentive listener. If you like your songwriting with a bit of meat, and some exotic flavour, this is the album for you.