Daytrotter's Best 15 Albums of 2007: These United States (The Forest and the Garden)
Jan 5, 2008
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Somehow we’re still having to get red-faced huffy about this album and its unbelievable difficulty in getting some running room, some open pasture and overwhelming acclaim one year on. This has nothing to do with becoming tight homies with this Jesse Elliott cat. It has everything to do with a boundless album that is every bit the soulful child of a man (and an accomplice in David Strackany, aka the one and only Paleo) who has an oddly expansive depth of knowing that if he were hairier, much shorter and three times as thick in the mid-section would be uncontrollably described as a miniature Buddha. The insightful, infra-red way of twisting the trials and the peaks of moving our lungs in and out and feeling it when our skin’s pinched is a knack for which Elliott could never want. It’s there and it’s a mysterious and pleasant force. The wood-floored delivery of his singing and sweetly massaging tone, coupled with the ingenious instrumental and arrangement contributions of Strackany make this record such a hidden jewel - albeit one that’s in plain, flooded daylight.
*What was written about _The Forest and the Garden_ previously right here:*
"The wooded home that he’s staying in is 100 yards down the mountain from the big Hollywood sign, which he thinks is probably yellower than it appears when you’re up close to it. There’s nothing between the house where he’s staying and one of the most famous vestiges of America. It is the last house before the signage and that sign is alluring. Here’s how Elliott describes it, "So, to get to this place we’re staying, we drive through the Hollywood gate, into the neighborhood, around all these hairpin turns up the side of a mountain, all of which ends at Mulholland Highway, which is not to be confused with Mulholland Drive of course. This trip falls more on the light fantastical side of mystical, and less on the Lynchian apocalyptic one, though of course them’re two sides of the same coin/godhead. At the very end is this big old brown wooden A-Frame house, wherein live Cornelia the Sufi and Tom Arcuragi, the relation to this trip, a 58-year-old wildman producer-type with stories of Tokyo and Dehli and everywhere in between, living here with an ever-rotating cast of characters, it seems (I can’t keep track) - all very bohemian and it makes you feel like a fake for even using that word, cause they’ve been here and been doin’ it so long and so well and so...Well, anyway...ringed around the back of their property, and lined all up and down the streets, are these signs that say, ‘No Hiking to the Hollywood Sign,’ with, get _this_ shit, a One-Hundred-and-THREE dollar fine for those caught. Apparently, those caught, according to Tom, are done so by helicopter, with the boys in blue swooping down in on the Great White Hollywood Letters every once in a while with great big flood lights, just lookin’ for trouble, terrorists who might like to take all that symbolizes this here nation of ours and blow it to pieces, one sign at a time. They swoop in with floods and tell you to put your hands on your head and lie down on the ground and no movement’s allowed. It would all be very filmic, we think. So, naturally we’re thinking about trying it." That’s lusting. That’s what’s all fucking over _The Forest and the Garden_ - the reciprocal of all of that lusting - the will to climb up those hills of prickly vegetation, hugging the people along the way, asking them to divulge their lives, their secrets, their loves and wanting to know their fears and desires as intimately as we know our own and then getting to the apex, standing on top and then looking out at it all, letting your lungs suck it all in. You might refuse to exhale for a minute, trapping it all in, hoping it takes to its new environment. Elliott feels that there’s some Willie Nelson in all of us. He calls it the "most honest particle." And maybe that’s so. It would be better if there was more Elliott in the rest of us - free to lust away at all hours and gleefully bask in the rumble of it all."
*Daytrotter's Best 15 Albums of 2007*
15. John Vanderslice -- _Emerald City_
14. The National -- _Boxer_
13. These United States -- _The Forest and the Garden_
"These United States Official Site":http://www.theseunitedstates.net
"These United States MySpace":http://www.myspace.com/theseunited
