DFW on Charlie Rose:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPWh9yQbU4E

Glen Campbell
Meet Glen Campbell
(Capitol)

What a genius idea. Take Glen Campbell – an honourable journeyman who’s had his ups and downs sure, but whose rendering of Jimmy Webb’s ‘Wichita Lineman’ remains the holy grail of interpretive singing – and furnish him with a set of tunes forged by modern(ish) rock songwriters, all arranged and played with impeccable taste. The only surprise is Rick Rubin had nothing to do with it (production honours go to Julian Raymond and Howard Willing, and there are cameos by a couple of Cheap Tricksters too).

Meet Glen Campbell is a masterclass in how to make a song your own. The man knows it too: dig the sleeve’s Ezekiel quotation: “Sing to the lord and make music in your heart to him.” So, the choice of Travis’s ‘Sing’ as an opener is something a mission statement. It’s also a glorious 60s baroque country-pop reimagining of the tune (and let it be said, that band might have been dubbed terminally uncool by the hiperati, but Fran Healy can write a melody). Campbell follows it with a brace of Tom Petty tunes, ‘Walls’ and ‘Angel Dream’, triumphs of Rickenbacker chimes and grooves that are Keltner-like in their stoicism, plus sweeping, swooning strings.

If a great actor is defined by his choice of roles, then a singer is only as good as his A&R instincts. The song selection here is inspired. Foo Fighters’ ‘Times Like These’ is played Heartbreakers style, with Hank Marvin tremelo replacing powerchords, while the violin section provides panoramic back projection. Jackson Browne’s ‘These Days’ is as delicately autumnal as Nico’s version (and that’s saying something), Green Day’s ‘Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)’ loses none of its careworn airs through being reworked as a 2/4 country shuffle, and U2’s ‘All I Want Is You’ is delivered humbly but flawlessly, returning the song to its Spector roots while retaining Van Dyke Parks’s woozy string charts. And the glistening, gorgeous takes on Paul Westerberg’s ‘Sadly, Beautiful’ and John and Yoko’s ‘Grow Old With Me’ will drive a dozen shiny nails through your heart.

Meet Glen Campbell is a near perfect record.

All of us at the Revelatorium were shocked and saddened to learn that David Foster Wallace took his own life this weekend. We hope he’s found some measure of peace on the other side.

Lisa Hannigan – Sea Sew (IHT)

Until now, Lisa Hannigan could have given lessons in how to project Elusive. All we knew of her was the voice, a deceptively spectral instrument that by turns shadowed, contradicted and chided her male leads. Although instantly Google-able as the waifish hippychick in Damien Rice’s romantic period dramas, or the playful counterpoint to Gary Lightbody on the lovely alt-country Cake Sale duet ‘Some Surprise’, she still seemed like that increasingly rare thing: an under-interviewed folk idoru.

Now the ghostess is made flesh. Sea Sew is, for want of a better description, an avant-folk suite. In a modern domestic context it could be regarded as a sister piece to David Geraghty’s Kill Your Darlings or Maria Doyle Kennedy’s Mutter, but its roots are deep, infused with the searching spirit of early 70s acts like Van, Laura Nyro or Tim Buckley, wayward grail-questers who wove together variant but compatible strains of free jazz, folk and Andulasian esoterica.

‘An Ocean And A Rock’ and ‘I Don’t Know’ braid Joni’s virtuosity with the lovely tapestries of Morrison’s No Guru, while ‘Sea Song’ and ‘Keep It All’ are adorned with twists, tricks and stitchings drawn from classical, Spanish and Celtic streams.

Hannigan’s vocals are neither stridently show-offy nor given to the breathy don’t-look-at-me/look-at-me parlour games of shoegazing songbirds. Her cast of players – including Rice regulars Shane Fitzsimons on stand-up bass and cellist Vyvienne Long, plus Tom Osander on drums and Gavin Glass on piano – are accomplished but idiosyncratic, never phoning in the slick lick, never watching the clock, always taking the trouble to forge the kind of sounds (embellished by harmonium, trumpet and glockenspiel) you can’t find in the off-the-rack Ikea catalogue of the sonic dial-up digimart.

These performances happen in real time, and sometimes slow real time down to a point where the songs create their own continuum. ‘Courting Blues’ is a peak, full of drifting seashore and woodlands airs, yet elevated beyond the plain pastoral by neo-eastern notes bent to perfection, borderline atonal string drones, subtle, loping rhythms. And the closing chamber pieces for piano and voice, ‘Pistachio’, ‘Lille’, and the epic ‘Teeth’, are by turns pretty, brittle, bitter and bewitching.

Sea Sew is a beautifully crafted piece of work. It might take its own sweet time to insinuate itself into the listener’s favours, but is all the more beguiling for it.

Colm Mac Con Iomaire – The Hare’s Corner (Plateau)

Anyone who’s taken note of Frames fiddler Colm Mac Con Iomaire’s contributions to that band’s finer moments – the epic perambulations of ‘Fitzcarraldo’, the simple heart-stabbing strokes of ‘Happy’ – or watched him hunched over various dictaphones, pedals and customised gizmos during their mid-period, will express no surprise at the scope of his debut album.

The title refers to the corner of a field left uncut by farmers to offer refuge for hares; this collection provides a similar service for the many orphan pieces he’s composed over the years. Recorded over two weeks in a trailer in Wexford and produced by Karl Odlum, The Hare’s Corner grants this multi-instrumentalist (violin, harmonium, banjo, bouzouki, guitar and cello) unlimited free expression.

Mac Con Iomaire may have started out as part of the Kila collective, but his range runs well beyond the Celtic pastoral and into the post-rock, the ambient and the neo-classical. ‘Thou Shalt Not Carry Timber’ suggests a jazzier Dirty Three; ‘Time Will Tell’ effortlessly evolves from the whimsical to the epic; ‘The Court Of New Town’ might have been commissioned for a chieftain’s wedding, such is its splendour. And if titles like ‘The Cuckoo of Glen Nephin’, ‘Emer’s Dream’ and ‘Second Wave’ evoke Yeats’s first act, the atmospheres are as close to Michael Nyman or even Arvo Part as O’Riada.

Hollywood scouts looking to headhunt Mac Con Iomaire’s Swell Season comrades would be wisely directed towards this little item for their soundtrack requirements. The Hare’s Corner is a graceful, stately piece of work.

Jakob Dylan – Seeing Things (Columbia)

Dylan the younger has come of age, inheriting the long black coat and moral heft of the old man, but without buckling under the influence. He’s also working for the family business: his first solo album might be co-distributed by Starbucks Entertainment, but it also bears that familiar fire-engine red Columbia logo. If that isn’t enough pedigree, Rick Rubin produced the sessions at his house in the Hollywood Hills.

As you might have guessed, Seeing Things is a bare bones acoustic record, and while the sparsity flatters Dylan’s gorgeous baritone, which evokes a bluesier, more robust Nick Drake, the material is pitched somewhere between Bruce and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billie.

Maturity becomes the Wallflower, especially on the opening ‘Evil Is Alive And Well’, a tightly coiled little gospel riddle, and ‘I Told You I Couldn’t Stop’, which is akin to one of Marvin Gaye’s love-and-war soul similes set to a Delta figure.

But it’s not all apocalyptic. ‘Something Good This Way Comes’ turns the weird sister’s augury on its head and reshapes itself as a bucolic breath of hope in an election year. ‘Valley Of The Low Sun’, ‘Everybody Pays As They Go’, ‘Will It Grow’, ‘On Up The Mountain’ – these are all well-made songs; sawed, planed and varnished with care. One wonders if Jakob hasn’t been sitting on Josh Ritter’s back porch trading licks over a spittoon. Seeing Things is a gratifyingly rustic artifact full of stern homilies, home comforts and autumn songs.

True Grit

Baltimore Has Poe; Philadelphia Wants Him

Back in the 14th century, Dante Alighieri wrote perhaps the definitive verse about the onset of male menopause: “Midway in his alloted threescore years and ten, Dante comes to himself with a start and realises that he has strayed from the True Way into the Dark Wood of Error.”

The problem with mid-life crisis, usually considered to occur between the ages of 40 and 50, is that it happens way past the halfway mark in a man’s life. Once you hit your late thirties, as Martin Amis observed in The Information, nature’s done with you.

Understandably enough, male writers are obsessed with the subject, from Yeats, Roth and Updike right up to William Leith’s new book Bits of Me Are Falling Apart: Dark Thoughts from the Middle Years. A few weeks ago, the Australian novelist Tim Winton said: “In middle age that sense of being naked and confused and bewildered and outpaced and misunderstood and self-conscious, it all comes around again. I think that often takes people by surprise. It’s often trivialised when people talk about mid-life crisis as though everybody in the world as a male goes out and buys a sports car and humps the secretary or whatever, but most people just feel disoriented and awkward and inadequate in the same way you did at 15.”

So spare a moment’s thought for the many poor schmucks muddling through the second act. Some, like Lester from American Beauty, will gleefully regress to adolescence. Some surrender to premature old age. Some will drink and smoke themselves to a slow death; some will hit the gym and the tattoo parlour. Some will prosper and fatten, others will buckle under the yoke of mortgages, back taxes, alimony or palimony payments. Some will carry out humble acts of daily heroism on behalf of their families, some will fuck up royally, and some will find a few small, good things to keep them alive.

I’ll be 40 this November, and Iggy Pop’s spoken word piece ‘No Shit’ tolls in the mind like a bell.

“It was in the winter of my fiftieth year when it hit me: I was really alone, and there wasn’t a hell a lot of time left. Every laugh and touch that I could get became more important. Strangely, I became more bookish, and my home and study meant more to me. As I considered the circumstances of my death, I wanted to find a balance between joy and dignity on my way out. Above all, I didn’t want to take any more shit. Not from anybody.”

Ballina Arts Centre Event