Nick Drake
“I personally prefer to think Nick committed suicide, in the sense that I'd rather he died because he wanted to end it than it to be the result of a tragic mistake. That would seem to me to be terrible: for it to be a plea for help that nobody hears.” – Nick Drake’s sister
“Um…so…yay for suicide?” – Me
“To investigate this suicide question, I’ll be suspending my campaign.” – John McAngryOldMan
Albums Reviewed:
Nick Drake is a shy, quiet, introspective British singer-songwriter who sold about 500 total records during the time he was alive, suffered from depression, and died extremely young and in such a way that it’s unclear whether or not he committed suicide. In an unsurprising development, he’s often feted today as a god. I began listening to his albums three or four years ago and off and on have attempted to listen to them seriously enough to review the man, but for some reason I’ve never been able to get up the thrust to make a page for him until now, which is ironic because of how little time I actually have to do this now in grad school. There are probably a bunch of reasons why I was never really able to get a Nick page off the ground. I did put him in my “Who should Brad review?” polls a few times and he always did well, but not well enough to win (I’m discontinuing those for the time being, by the way. If and when I’m no longer in grad school and have the time to update about as regularly as I did for a month or two back there in the summer, I’ll bring them back). His catalog is short enough that he was always back there as a “stopgap” review page if I found myself immersed in a massive catalog (like David Bowie, for instance) and wanted to take a break, but I never did get to use him as a stopgap because shitty bands I reviewed as favors to friends five years ago kept putting out albums (Fucking Bloc Party just put one out! Goddammit). There’s also the fact that, as nice and lovely as a Nick Drake album sounds, he is so quiet and unassuming that the excitement factor when listening to a given Nick Drake song is usually extremely low. This doesn’t mean he’s not a good, interesting musician. It just means that the ease with which like half of one of his albums could play while I was surfing the internet (or even doing something productive!) without registering in my brain is quite high. If you pay attention to him, though, he can be pretty great, don’t get me wrong. But his melodies are usually not top-notch enough to make up for the fact that he’s so overwhelmingly quiet that, unless you are paying attention, he can easily slip right on by without your noticing. It’s hard to review someone if you listen to his albums five times and can’t remember anything, you know?
Nick is a very able musician, though, and one whom you should all at least have a little bit of in your collection. His main strength is his voice – a soft, soothing, mellifluous baritone that is not a whit like Geddy Lee’s honkbox and sounds like it’s whispering sweet nothings in your ear no matter what the lyrics may be about. If you like Bob Dylan’s folk songs but are bothered by his voice (which would of course mean you’re a fucking idiot), Nick may be for you. I can’t think of a voice less apt to annoy anyone. It’s like velvet or something. His skills as an acoustic guitar player are also quite admirable, and usually a few times an album they’ll show up in an especially tricky tuning or plucking sequence, but he’s averse enough to showing off these skills that long stretches of music can take place without your realizing he has them. The one unifying quality of all of his music is that it’s “nice.” It always sounds lovely and soothing and just good on the ear. The upshot of this is that it rarely challenges the listener with much of anything (unless you want to call the utter barrenness of Pink Moon “challenging,” which may or may not be your prerogative), but soothing is still good. Not everything has to be Master of Puppets. The overwhelming nicety of everything, though (as I’ve mentioned before), means that not a lot of his stuff sticks, and after listening to this stuff so much recently I still can only hum like five or six Nick Drake songs without having to listen to them for reference. As such, his records all get very good ratings from me, due to their overwhelming goodness and niceness, but the lack of more than a few truly memorable melodies per album means they can’t go higher than 8. The sound and the feel, though? Very nice. I just like listening to him, and you probably will too.
Nick’s
recording career was brief and tragic.
He was spotted playing in a club around
And, onto the reviews!
Five Leaves Left (1969)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “Time Has
Told Me”
Very pastoral, this one is. Very, very…pastoral. I’ve seen it described as “autumnal” in other places, but I’m gonna go ahead and stick with “pastoral.” Extremely nice and pleasant as well. Its melodic acoustic plucking, tastefully-arranged strings and soothing low baritone murmur of a voice are very easy on the ears indeed. I’m pretty sure it’s my favorite Nick Drake album, too, even if I’m not 100% sure how much I like it despite having listened to it at least twenty times now. I’ve yet to determine how many, you know, “melodies” this record has, you see. I’m off in this pretty, melancholic, brooding little pastoral world that Nick has created for everyone, and I’m having a good time silently sitting under a tree in the forest and admiring its lush foliage and quietly contemplating my solitude and whatnot, and this is all good, but at the end of the forty minutes I spend doing this, the lushest make-believe foliage in the world isn’t gonna change the fact that “Time Has Told Me” is the only song on the album where I can actually remember the melody that Nick sings. Granted, “Time Has Told Me” and its mildly countrified slide guitar embellishments may provide the best single vocal melody you can find in the Nick Drake oeuvre, and this is nice, but no matter how tasteful and well-constructed much of the other material here is, I often find myself humming “Time Has Told Me” and forgetting everything else. And you know I like stupid catchy songs, so don’t act like you’re surprised. You know I started listening to Cheap Trick in earnest a month or two ago? Yeah, they’re fucking awesome. Of course they are. They write Brad music.
Anyway, even if Nick Drake isn’t really “Brad music,” I do like and admire the man, and I’m always as objective as I can be when I review all the hundreds of albums I slog through on a daily basis (for which I neglect to post updates anymore because I’m probably rewriting an abstract for the fifth time). This, despite its lack of truly memorable and hooky material, is a very pretty album. Plus, I sincerely doubt that “hookiness” was really something that Mr. Drake was going for when he wrote it. It’s not like he’s trying to write “Dream Police” here. He’s moody! He’s quiet and keeps to himself and stuff. I get the feeling that, if Nick had his druthers, this would’ve just been him and his acoustic (this feeling is made easier to have by the fact that Pink Moon has no extra instrumentation whatsoever, of course), but the strings and stuff are nice. “River Man” is supposed to be the centerpiece, I’m told, and it’s very pretty. Melancholy, brooding, interesting…you know, a Nick Drake song. Some of the string arrangements here are a little unexpectedly off-kilter, so that’s appreciated. I like it when strings do things besides play big, obvious slop chords. I’m not sure if I’m the hugest fan of “Way to Blue,” which literally has no instrumentation at all outside of the string section and Nick’s voice, but otherwise we’re in good shape. “Fruit Tree” is about as “big” and “dramatic” as we get in this otherwise unpretentious little pastoral folk album, but it’s also nice. Big and swooping, yet tasteful as always. Dig the oboe, too. I like a nice oboe.
It’s probably a side effect of my bad taste that the songs I tend to like the most are the more upbeat ones when this is an album by a depressed British folkie who may or may not have killed himself by an overdose of anti-depression medication, but hey, I’ve somehow been able to work two Cheap Trick references (now three!) into a Nick Drake review, so, again, don’t act like you’re surprised by this. I very much like the bouncy, plucky “Cello Song” and the almost criminally lightweight, jazzy piano number “Man in a Shed,” and while Nick Drake freaks may castigate me for not wanting to listen to “River Man” on repeat for an hour, I really fucking like Cheap Trick, so there (plus I totally like that song!). No matter how “bouncy” or whatever a song is, though, the pastoral melancholy of the whole thing remains and covers the album with a lovely sheen of “unified theme and vision.” This is good, and this is also why I can give a moderately high 8 to an album that only has one song whose hook I can ever remember. Even the songs that one might call “filler” (e.g. “Thoughts of Mary Jane,” perhaps) keep the vibe going nicely, which is why it’s nearly impossible to call anything on this record “filler.” An album with such a uniformly pretty sound doesn’t have filler, you know? An album that relies on an all-encompassing and extremely pleasurable “pastoral” atmosphere doesn’t have filler, because it’s less a collection of songs than a pop album by a pop band who have no atmosphere and rely solely on pop hooks (like, say, Cheap Trick) is a collection of songs. So when a pop band with no atmosphere writes a B or C-level song, it’s filler and it knocks the rating of an album down, but when Nick Drake writes a B or C-level song but colors it with a lovely swath of pastoral beauty, then, well, it’s a pretty piece of folk music and it lowers the rating of said album not one bit! This is how I can give a relatively high 8 to an album with only one memorable song on it, you see.
Dammit, this thing is just so pretty and nice. I dare anyone to listen to it and not find it overwhelmingly pleasant. Nick’s voice is very peaceful, his guitar playing is disarmingly skillful at times (witness the speed with which he plucks along during the breaks in “Three Hours”), the strings and whatnot are very tasteful, and whole vibe is just really, really nice. It’s not gonna tear anyone a new asshole. It’s not really gonna get anyone all that excited at all, really. But it’s very pretty. And “Time Has Told Me” fucking owns, man.
Bryter Layter (1970)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “Hazey
Jane II”
Similarly inscrutable and difficult to truly get into but also very, very different from its predecessor, Bryter Layter is the one where the producers add a bunch of horns and strings (though strings were on the last album too, so…nevermind) and tinkly pianos and a full-on drum set (sell-out!) to the “Nick Drake sound” in an attempt to sell more than 300 copies. And of course it somehow managed to sell even fewer copies than the first album, and Nick settled into a nice little depression there because of this, but hey! It’s still a pretty good little album, even if the jazz-pop-lite production add-ons make it seem a little less “consequential” than the first one. There are also three instrumental tracks on here, which is notable because there weren’t any on the last album and because, like the last album, there are a grand total of ten songs here. None of the three really do much of anything, so what you’re left with is seven songs that sound like Nick Drake, except filtered through some sort of quasi-jazzy production that likes tippity-tap drums and horns.
Thankfully, the material is just about as good as that on the last record, and again most everything is so overwhelmingly agreeable and nice and soothing and lovely that I have a hard time giving it a rating lower than 8, even if out of the three albums the man has put out it’s probably the most deserving of bring dropped down a peg. For one thing, “Hazey Jane II” is a total upbeat folk-jazz-pop ditty that may or may not have sounded like it could have been on Pink Moon before Nick’s producers got their hands on it, but since it turns into a superbly light, bouncy little thing that displays Nick’s unique charms just as much as “Time Has Told Me” or “Pink Moon,” you know, the production is just fine. I know the idea of trumpets playing a major role in a Nick Drake song may sound odd to you, but trust me when I say it works. The production is very careful and tasteful here, despite all of the instruments in play. Hell, I like the production on the sequel “Hazey Jane I” (yes, it comes after II...) too, and that one has the trick where the percussion is like dramatic timpani rolls or something. On a Nick Drake song! And the dramatic rolls invariably end in cymbal crashes while these loud strings do a whole bunch of stuff in the background that comes dangerously close to being “glopped on” but somehow avoids this all-too-common pratfall. I know it may be silly to say a certain kind of production is strange for an artist when he’s only put out three albums and, hell, maybe the bare-bones acoustic one is the one that’s the stylistic anomaly? In response I can only say that these three albums, taken as a whole, give off the impression of a sensitive quiet folkie songwriter guy who would rather be left alone (and, yes, that’s exactly what Nick Drake was, but you’d be able to tell that from the music even if you didn’t know it anyway from his life story, if that makes sense). I don’t picture the guy that seems to come out in these songs writing them and thinking “Hey, you know what this thing needs? A fucking trumpet section!” I just don’t. And so perhaps it’s a credit to him that the songs where sixteen pounds of Big Production Value gets dumped on come off just as pleasant and well-wrought and agreeable as the ones with no such things, or perhaps it’s just a credit to his producer. In any case, I like both of the “Hazey Janes,” and I am a horrible writer who has no idea what he’s going to type before he types it.
Another winner is “One of These Things First,” a steady little jazzy acoustic number that canters (you like that verb, by the way?) along nicely behind some truly impressive acoustic plucking and piano tinkle. This album likes the tinkle. The one that seems to be famous here is “Poor Boy,” and again, you know…nice, pleasant jazzy time, I guess. I’m not sure about the saxophone soloing in the background for 90% of the song like David Sanborn, and I’m even less sure about the chorus of backup singers (which, unlike the trumpets in “Hazey Jane II,” does sound out of place and tacked on without tons of care), plus what’s with the meandering jazzman piano solo? Jazz-pop is all well and good, but I like the stuff that leans more toward the “pop” (e.g. “Hazey Jane II”) than the “jazz,” I guess. It’s still nice, though. Nick’s voice is too good not to get some enjoyment out of it. It even makes “At the Chime of a City Clock” tolerable, despite that one’s having a song-length sax solo like the one in “Poor Boy” but not enough “song” outside of the strings and tippity-tap drums to distract the listener from it.
The times it seems that Nick is auditioning for a spot at a jazz club are where this album is least convincing. “At the Chime of a City Clock” and even “Poor Boy” (despite the fact that I like it, technically) are just awkward mixes of stuff that never cohere together into the pleasant kind of stew I so enjoyed on “Hazey Jane II” and the best material on Five Leaves Left. They’re heavy, you know? I want “light” and “charming” from Nick, like the harpsichord-folk “Fly,” which may be the cutest thing ever, and the excellent “Northern Sky,” which grafts heavenly keyboards, tinkly pianos, and jazz-lite drums onto one of Nick’s folk creations in a way that seems lighter than air, even with that part when the organ gets real loud and drowns a bunch of stuff out. And you know why? Because it stays on the “pop” side of things. Nick doesn’t let the jazzy gook dominate the song. It adds to it without overpowering it. Very important.
Anyway, Nick Drake is still very shy and still very sweet and still very melancholy, though this time the melancholy is hidden behind tappity-tippity jazz-lite drums and horns and stuff. If you want to rate it below Five Leaves Left because 30% of the songs are instrumental and thus inconsequential, then that’s fine, but I get the same “hey, that was very nice!” feeling from this one that I do from the last one, so I’m gonna rate it the same even though it’s probably not as good. And while this is certainly Nick’s “biggest” album, it’s not like it’s even remotely “loud.” Still very quiet and polite. So if you like Cannibal Corpse you’re not gonna like this any more than Five Leaves Left, unfortunately.
Pink Moon (1972)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “Pink
Moon”
Nick’s “stark, unproduced” album, and also the one often cited as a masterpiece by hardcore Nick Drake fans (at least as I’m led to believe). Isn’t that always the case, by the way? “This one is Nick stripped down to his essence! It’s just Nick being Nick! All that overproduction on Bryter Layter masked the real pain inside Nick’s heart!” Or some such jazz. At least this is what I assume the reason is for calling this Nick’s best album. I’m putting words into the mouths of people that I’m led to believe exist but of whose existence I have no solid proof, you see (outside of Heath Ledger, at least). This is what people do when they have little imagination as a writer. They construct straw men to argue against, or they take a straw man constructed in the argument of another writer and use that straw man as if it’s a real, living, breathing man whose opinion must be discussed and incontrovertibly disproven. And it’s a shame, too, because I was all ready to cast my vote for this as Nick Drake’s best album. But then Nancy Pelosi personally showed up at my apartment and gave a speech haranguing those who argue that Five Leaves Left is Nick Drake’s best album as weak-kneed followers of Cletus W. Retard’s failed economic policies, and, dammit, I felt like I had to take a stand for Five Leaves Left, even if it meant that you’re probably reading this review from an internet café right now because you had to sell your computer to avoid being evicted from your appointment. Look, these are tough times, and it’s not my fault that your idea of “diversification” was putting half your money in AIG and the other half in Lehman Bros. The important thing to note is that our economy…the fundamentals of our economy are strong.. Actually, no, we’re in a crisis. By “fundamentals” I just meant the American worker, you see. That’s what Herbert Hoover meant when he said that, too (little known fact). Heck, it’s such a crisis that I’m gonna suspend this website and return to Washington to deal with it even though I’m just a Classics PhD student with a fetish for Bob Dylan who has roughly as much knowledge about the economy as John McCain’s strangely-absent-from-all-press-photos adopted Bangladeshi daughter. Actually, no, I’m gonna do that tomorrow (Katie Couric asked to see me!), and then when I get there I’m gonna sit in the photo-op meeting I’m personally responsible for setting up and contribute not a single thing to the discussion, and then, after I leave, the bill that might help solve the crisis will mysteriously fall apart. Then I’m gonna spend all weekend taking credit for the eventual passing of an improved bill and talking about how I called all the House Republicans urging them to vote for it, and then when the bill shockingly fails because the people I said I’d get to vote for it didn’t and the Dow has its lowest single-day drop in history I’m gonna blame my opponent. He’s uppity!
I’m also gonna pull a Jimi Hendrix for Nick Drake and give all three of his albums the same rating because I’m indecisive and can’t make a judgment. If you want to know in what order I’d rate them, I’d put this one second between Five Leaves Left (the most best) and Bryter Layter (the least best), but the quality gap between the three of them is so small that your relative enjoyment of them will probably just be determined by how you feel about their production. I think this is too little, Bryter Layter is a bit too much, and Five Leaves Left gets it just about right, but you’ll probably think differently. It’s not like anyone ever agrees with me, right? I suppose most people agree with me that the title track is the best song on the album, but that may be because it’s the one from that great Volkswagen commercial from a few years back with the attractive youngsters driving down a country road with their top down on a clear night and looking at the stars. Lovely ad it is, and lovely song. The little piano overdub is nicely done, and notable because it’s the only piece of production on the entire album that’s neither Nick’s voice nor his guitar. I did say “stark,” didn’t I? Yeah. I wasn’t kidding. This album finds Nick alone in a recording studio with one other guy for two days playing all the new material he has at his disposal into a microphone before leaving and calling it an album. That’s it. No overdubs (except for the one), no double-tracks, no symphony orchestras, no nothing. When this treatment works, it works very well. While I’m not sure if the title track and the similarly excellent “Place to Be” are the best songs of Nick’s career, it’s hard to construct a fool-proof argument that they’re not, and Nick’s “Nickness” does seem to shine through in these songs better now that everything else has been stripped away. The delicateness of his voice is extra-soothing now that the only other thing there is his strumming a guitar. “Place to Be” would have totally worked just as well in that car commercial.
When the
treatment doesn’t work, though, it often makes the songs sound simply
underdeveloped. Half of this album
sounds (to varying degrees) like demos or outtakes. Considering he sat in a room for two days and
played stuff with just one engineer there, I suppose this is to be expected,
but as the album gets into its second half, the songs seem less and less like
songs and more and more like undeveloped ideas given their own track
listing. The eighty second melodically
absent instrumental “Horn” is of course the worst offender here, but the
two-note repeated acoustic quasi-riff of “Know” (that I’m fairly certain I may be able to play if given enough
time to practice it) isn’t much better.
I took guitar lessons for one year in eighth grade and gave up because
my fingers were too short, so no, that’s not good. Nothing else matches those two in
“undeveloped-ness,” but much of the last part of the album does give one the
feeling that there just isn’t much there,
which is not the best feeling to have.
Is the stuff pretty? Is the
acoustic guitar work often impressive?
Is Nick’s voice consistently lovely?
Yeah. All of these things are
true. It just feels like it could have
used a little more work, you know? Not
everything needs more work, of course – a lot of the first half of the album
(except “Horn”) is nearly as beautiful as the title track and “Place to Be” (I
especially love “Which Will”), and the lack of any production whatsoever allows
the subtle melodies in the songs that sound like songs to stand out much better
than they did on Nick’s first two albums.
An entire album as good as the best four or five songs on here would
fucking brilliant, whether or not it managed to be longer than the twenty-eight
minutes we have here, and it’s that fact that does make me think that the “unproduced” treatment really may have
been the best path for Nick to follow.
Problem was he only had like 15 minutes of material that was up to
snuff. Remember this EP-length “album”
has literally all the material, good
and bad, that Nick had ready to go at this point. How the hell else do you think “Horn” got on
here, anyway?
I like how I wrote my longest
Nick Drake review for the man’s shortest album.
You can probably listen to Pink
Moon in a shorter time than it takes you to read this. I guess that’s what happens when I devote
half a page to the snarky political commentary I know everyone hits up this
music review website for, eh? Anyway,
this one, like the other two, is good.
Nick Drake is good. I like
him. I don’t love him or anything, but he’s nice. Lovely voice and all that. Good times and whatnot. Rabble rabble rabble. Yes we can!
By the way,
you know that I could name more Supreme Court cases when I was ten than Sarah
Palin can name now? It’s OK,
though. She can see
David Dickson (ddickso2@uccs.edu) writes:
Now now now, you so can NOT
see Kamchatka from
To tell the truth, I haven't heard any Drake album other than Pink Moon.
It took a couple listens, but I think I have drunk the Kool-Aid too--this
is one of the most tightly constructed half-hour albums of ANY style I've ever
heard. Yeah, it's minialist, and only about half the songs could be
called "classics," but a.) they're spread more or less evenly across
the album, and b.) the linking material just fits like a glove. It's not
so much that the individual SONGS are great, but that all of them together are
greater than the wimpy twenty-seven-minute sum of their parts. And, of
course, "Parasite" is one of the best songs of the '70's. Also,
trippy cover. Also, fuck car commercials AND music videos. If I
never hear or hear OF one of those again ERRRRGH.