MUSIC REVIEW: MONSTERS OF FOLK
Great Music - Our Only Real Complaint Is Their Use of The F Word: "Folk"
(Rough Trade/Shangri-La Music) Why "folk"? Why now? What the hell is "folk" anyhow? This exact question is one of those brow-beaters that most people just refuse to beg it. Instead, we spew out these monikers and labels to compartmentalize the ever-expanding oblivion of the musical universe. We have to. We have to do these pointless exercises and litter our iTunes and music reviews with meaninglessness and/or genre specifications. It's necessary, I suppose, for us to "understand" music. After all, we are, tragically, still human as much as God and all our wildest dreams try to convince us otherwise.
Another tragedy is the fact that all the wise sages who once knew the answer to the question "What the hell is "folk"? are dead and gone now. Well...wait. Levon Helm is still burning the candle at both ends somewhere on this planet right now. Perhaps he's the last living, breathing prophet with the clarity of heart and mind to enlighten this curious cat as to what in God's precious name "folk" is! But he'd probably laugh it off and just say something so modestly epic as..."Heh...well, son, it's people, you know." Blast!
It's not worth it. I'm not getting anywhere. Nonetheless, I'm sitting here with a mean thirst for hops and barley, and I've still got Conor Oberst, Jim James, M. Ward, and Mike Mogis yodeling and yelping, sliding metal slides on six strings over my (shoddy at best) computer speakers (Crank up the re-verb! Please!). If that's not enough, all four of their illustrated mugs are staring at me from my monitor now as I write these very words. Horrifying. There's nothing threatening about these guys. Not at all. Nothing, as you'd probably assume, very threatening about their music either. HA! But I can't help but notice the divergent image of James as compared to his three compadres. The man looks like a lumberjack at a church youth convention: Conor, the soft spoken disciple; M. Ward, the honorary foreign exchange student; and Mogis, the well-meaning but fatigued youth pastor. James is a brutish character, but warmly so. It's an odd dichotomy that, I think, provides his band (My Morning Jacket, for those of you who don't know) with that surreal transcendence so few bands can pull off nowadays. Nah...it's Hallahan that does that. James just has the voice.
(Focus, Ramus...you've written a page and you haven't written a word about the album. Alas, you're readers are used to this bullshit. They're faithful to your madness. Thank you, dear readers... Read on, please...)
First things: I can't bring myself to say this is folk so I'll just call these guys Monsters to save my integrity...and theirs. Their album, inappropriately titled Monsters of Folk, came into the public sphere on September 22, 2009. At that moment, I was putting some mileage on an old Ray Charles compilation I'd recently dug up. I was up to my neck in the best of gospel and soul. I had to make a significant shift to even start listening to this album. The first track, "Dear God (sincerely M.O.F.)," plays like a b-side from Evil Urges. The pace is set, initially, by an esoteric harp complimenting lo-fi beats while James and whoever else sing out a soliloquy to the Man Upstairs: "Dear God, I see your face in all I do/Sometimes its so hard to believe in..."
From there, it's more or less a toss around between James, Ward, and Oberst -- "Say Please" and "Whole Lotta Losin'" put a cup of sugar down your throat and leave you thirsty for something cool, hoppy...a bit bitter...so Oberst gives you "Temazcal" at #4. This is vintage Oberst. Pensive, annoyed, jaded and mildly romantic (if you're of the vein, male or female or both, that happens to be attracted to the type that enjoys jangled parallels, political imagery, and suicides before the apocalypse). Nonetheless, it's Oberst's first lead that gives the album a real stride. "The Right Place" is good ol' Jim James hiccuping to a more country rhythm and slide, which rings beautifully and offers us a real, at least more clear vision of what people mean when they attached the hellish title of "super-group" to this band. The rest of the album is hit and miss. "Baby Boomer" is good Ward but bad James (does that make sense?) "Man Named Truth" is a good one - maybe on account of the mandolin? You can't go wrong with a mandolin, can you? No. No, you can't. So it's good. 
The other aspect of this album that serves to be noted is that it appropriately highlights each of these artists' fortes, and that's worth investigating alone. Ward has always appealed to me in the same way that Jackson Browne always seems to find his way into my listening rotations, no matter how much I try to avoid him. Everything Ward does on the Monsters' album is worthy of Hold Time, his most recent full-length, and Oberst's work falls right in line with the ace card he's been dealing in the "indie" music scene for the last decade. Mogis, I'm convinced and 98% positive, operates like Egon Spengler for The Ghostbusters. He's the real brains of the operation and makes it all happen. James is always great. He's got a goddamn beard -- looks like a woodsman or a deranged Pentecostal preacher from somewhere out in the thickets of lower Appalachia. His voice sounds like it's calling back at us from somewhere in the far reaches of the afterlife. So he's good.
When I think of these four guys combining to form some sort of Monster, I imagine a rather peaceful beast -- heavy, real heavy on the re-verb, some dreamy beach-soundin' slide guitar-playing, and long, droning vocals that give me every inclination to sell all my belongings, get in the car, and head for the edge of the land, where the water kisses my feet and God Itself whispers with the breaking of the sea. In this light, this whole album is some sick game of torture. It beckons for possibilities that are mere apparitions (pipe dreams) in reality. Or, in other words, this is a "super-group." This is what "super-groups" do -- they stir up your expectations and sprinkle in some hype, stir it up occasionally as it boils, then they take a long, good piss over it all...and we love 'em for it, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. No one's ever discovered whether or not the combined piss of four great musical performers sounds good or bad. We like to imagine it does, and these "super-groups" do too. We all anticipate things to be much greater than they actually are. (It's the "Christmas Complex" of the human condition and it makes life terribly more enjoyable and exciting.) They join their forces, and we invest in them. It's disturbingly beautiful, which provides the perfect backdrop for decent to good to great tunes for everyone to imagine they enjoy.
The only real complaint I've got is that "folk" word in the title -- in the very name of the band. But I'll leave it to rest for now. I got another call from someone wanting my money today. This, among all things, is trivial. What I need now is horsepower, open windows, a Texas interstate, some good driving music...nothing wrong with that. Monsters has some good driving music.
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