A Week With The Skygreen Leopards' "Disciples of California": Day 5
21 December 2006
tell your friends...
Words by Tony Conte//Illustration by Richard Clarke
I’ve been tinkering around inside this album for a week. Stepping back now, soaking up the music, is akin to taking your final turn on the highway out of the city: a sharp edge of the last grey building sweeps across your windshield and drops behind you leaving only an overwhelming expanse of sky with which to contend.
“Love and pain will still reach you deep inside your grave,” they sing.
When you dive headlong into an album and begin to strip its layers away like string cheese the big picture evades you.
“I once knew every shadow of her face in the gloom”
My interpretation of the narrative between track “Sally Orchid” and “I Remember Sally Orchid” is a deceptively simple one: Losing someone you loved but couldn’t help to something you might never understand and living with that knowledge and memory. The instinct even now is to keep peeling away the layers. So much dust left to kick up only to watch it blow away.
No, let’s keep this simple: Is this album good? Yes. Great? Yes. Classic? Hmm, maybe.
Do I love it? Nope.
Here’s my shameful admission: “Country” is a four-letter word in my dictionary. I’m no cowboy. I don’t long for prarie nights and winking stars and building a fire to keep the brisk chill at bay. I’d just as soon have light-pollution and a little global warming if it means I don’t have to wear five layers just to walk to my car in the morning. I can’t tie anything but a double knot, and I’m considering going back to “Roo’s” to avoid even that unpleasantry. Slip knot? Forget it. I didn’t even make it to Boy Scout. I flunked out at Webelos. So any album which spreads its wings eagle-wide and soars above the Tetons is destined to lose me. How I know that this album is great is that it didn’t.
Skygreen Leopards have crafted, yes, skillfully crafted an album to sound as if it were slapped together with popsicle sticks and stick-glue. This is what time does to great music: it allows a collection of songs to reveal their whispered secrets. The secrets here are the memorable melodies that you miss on first listen for all of the breathy sadness. The secret is that the droll, heroin-slow march of the drums forces the songs to lurch forward where they might rather curl into themselves and go fetal for self-pity and hopeless longing. The secret is that this album’s scraggly beard and unkempt hair shouldn’t fool you. You won’t smell a hint of patchouli, because it showered before it got here, and that “unkempt” cut cost 400 bucks.
You’ve got to give it to them, for a down and dirty excursion into the beginnings of a genre, Skygreen Leopards have done even the long-gone greats a bit of justice. This baby of Garcia and Williams is all grown up, and he knows what he’s done: he’s calmly coaxed a rough and tumble reverie out of a few waylaid and ornery instruments. But it’s his vacant eyes and breathless words that will haunt you.
although I admire and appreciate tito’s position here vis-a-vis the almost inescapably consumerist nature of contemporary criticism (of almost any variety, in my opinion), the umbrage I’ll take here has nothing to do with that. rather, I can’t quite get my head around you calling this album “country.” Perhaps I’ve had my head done in by too many Uncle Tupelo bootlegs, but “Discpiples of California” just doesn’t strike me as a country record. Brilliant? Yup. Profoundly wistful and deeply saddening? Mmm hmmm. Thought-provoking? Sure ‘nough. But it’s hardly “country.” Or even “Country”...
Regards,
Jeff
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tony, reviewers understandably look for reference points in all the music they review, which is partly due to the consumerism this kind of reviewing is loosely attached to. people like you do not have the ‘ears’ or depth to hear something like the skygreen leopards album for what it is. fundamentally you are coming from the wrong place and this music is not intended for people whose ears are like ladies of the night -because it all ‘feels’ the same despite your gaudy reviews and attempts at objectivity. Your writing kind of sounds good, but it isn’t. thanks