Lofty Pillars - Amsterdam
(Truckstop)
More than any other artform today, music is required to have a direct emotional relevance to the writer. Filmwriters and novelists are often creating totally artificial storylines. Painters and visual artists are only ever personal in the abstract form. However, if a songwriter creates lyrics based on something artificial, the work is often seen as tarnished. A rapper would say such a songwriter wasn't "keeping it real," and that applies to many other styles of music as well.
The Lofty Pillars' second album of orchestral pop, Amsterdam, causes an initial stand offish reaction because it so blatantly doesn't "keep it real." Amsterdam is built on entirely artificial storylines, storylines so involved that it can have nothing to do with a musician hanging out in Wicker Park, Chicago. Instead the lyrics read like a synopsis of a novel, telling the story as a series of main events and concentrating on the main symbolism of the story. People are raped, people are murdered, the murderer is stopped; the storyline is involved and hard to pin down, and it's much easier to concentrate on the main symbol of the story, water, and the music and arrangements.
Water is a wonderful symbol to use because it can represent so many things: running water can represent life, it is an essential element to purification (baptismal or otherwise), and, as is the case of Amsterdam with its many canals and waterway, it can represent distance and separation. All these meanings of water (as well as others, mind you) are all worked into the lyrics, and the songs that are based on this symbolism are among the best on this album.
Songwriters Wil Hendricks and Michael Krassner take a more equal role in performing and recording the songs.
Hendricks sings and plays lead piano on one of the album's best track, "Roll Down." Here the symbolism of water conveys both the tears of emotional breakdown and the ability to rinse away the stain of bad deeds, the cello and viola providing a somber tone to the piano melody. "Fade Away" uses the symbolism of water in a totally different way, the phrase "your rolling waters have run still" used as a metaphor for death (in a later song, "ice" is used for the same purpose). The piano and vocals sound hopeful here, Hendricks singing the chorus in his highest voice, but the hope in the lyrics is a very dark hope, that a recently killed body will "fade away" without anyone bothering to notice.
Also poignant is "Eulogy," which comes off as a darker version of an Oscar nominated original song by Randy Newman. The chorus first sounds like sappy romanticism, asking "Will you go to him tonight?" But keep in mind what the title of the song is. Musically, to assist in conveying the darker subject matter, Amsterdam is a bit more reserved than its predecessor, When We Were Lost. The orchestral flourishes are still present, arranged once again by Fred Lonberg-Holm, but they are understated to better fit the death and dismay of the story. As a result, the songs sound much closer to the songwriters' main inspiration, Bob Dylan, than the more 70s AM pop (e.g., Burt Bacharach), to which When We Were Lost was more easily compared.
Frankly, the more restrained orchestration makes Amsterdam less initially enjoyable than When We Were Lost. Still, the album has its fair share of literate, absorbing lyrics, sweeping melodies, and beautiful songs. The disclaimer from the end of this site's review of the Lofty Pillar's first album still applies: "If you don't want to hear beautiful music, please don't buy it."
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