There are two main themes I seem to always hit upon when I write one of these things: the nature of the past to come back in surprising and different ways – or well, transformed ways – and the nature of the postmodern reaction to modernity/modernism (depending on whether I mean it in a philosophico-historical or literary/artistic way…I’m not sure there is a huge difference, or rather, I’m not sure the same kind of concerns don’t motivate both strands of the post-Platonic obsession with Reason in all its transformations throughout history, and there are many) and how it’s the driving force behind certain artistic concerns, whether consciously or unconsciously, in certain albums. I can’t help but try to fit the albums I end up reviewing into these thematic molds, and honestly, I usually don’t review anything that hasn’t been reviewed somewhere else probably, so it’s not like there are things going unsaid because I choose to concentrate on more…metaphysical matters. Metaphysical? Maybe.
Anyway, Dave Bernabo is another Pittsburgh (I almost accidentally typed Putzburgh, which is no bit of calumny on the city, but rather some neuron in my head misreading where to go with the “P” and the intention to write the city’s name) compatriot, or ex-compatriot seeing as I don’t live there any longer. He sent me his album Word Roses a while ago; I think it’s been available for maybe a month to everyone, and let me give it my endorsement for whatever that’s worth.
Bernabo seems (I say “seems” because I’ve never asked him) to be coming out of a newer kind of tradition (is it a tradition then if it’s new?) that takes bits and pieces from what most people would call the avant-garde and fashions them into songs. Wilco kind of did that on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot which ostensibly was just a rock album with a few experimental flourishes, but Mathew Friedberger’s new one is like this as are Final Fantasy’s latest, and even Destroyer, at least lyrically. Personally, this is my favorite method of songwriting, that is, the kind of ephemeral nature that inhabits much of the avant-garde world (from free jazz to modern composition to the freer end of the neo-folk or new weird America or whatever you choose to call it to noise and so on and so forth) combined with the structures that a song, in the general meaning of song (since any piece of music is really a song), allows. The structure hooks you in, but the fleeting bits allow the piece to move and change and to not stagnate. The second song on the album, “H-Hawks” (which I’m not sure if it is a stutter or a kind of hawk, an h-hawk) is a particularly nice example of this with that beautifully mercurial guitar line that flits about behind the piano and rhythm guitar. In addition, the good thing about structure is that it creates expectations which the ephemeral parts may dash. The dissolution of the expectation is a particularly effective artistic tool to keep a piece of art interesting.
Of course, this isn’t a slight against either straight-up songs or straight-up “experimental” works (though I’m not sure what straight-up means in the latter use), but just a personal preference. Any piece of music can be made interesting for a variety of reasons. This is merely one method.
