33 rebellions per minute
1999
Julia Darling, FIGURE 8
Before 1999 ends and I stick FIGURE 8 somewhere on my annual Best Albums list, it seems only fair to explain how close I came to giving it bored, two-listens-and-out dismissal, if only to let you the reader decide if you're likely to give it the same. The mental file I almost put FIGURE 8 in is one with the admittedly nonsensical title "post-Alanis drivel". I coined the name in 1997, before I could know that Alanis's second album would be radical and (to me) wonderful, but after it became clear that all my defenses of JAGGED LITTLE PILL's intelligence would be mocked, in specific by Meredith Brooks's "Bitch" (which I consider the living realization of every leading misleading anti-Morissette slur), in general by a wave of radio-ready insecurity anthems by Tara McLean and Jann Arden and Natalie Imbruglia and Abra Moore that, whatever their individual merits, shared a fixed musical production style and the guiding assumption that the proper answer to a stranger's inquiry of "How are you today?" is a 250-word enumeration of one's current aches. Many of my favorite songwriters could be fairly described as "introspective", but they safely skirt around "self-obsessed", be it by focusing on the dynamics and inconsistencies of human interactions (Alanis, Tamara Williamson); or the telling details of little life stories that need not always be the author's own (Veda Hille, Dave Bidini); or the nifty whimsical-cum-insightful ways one can interrelate one's feelings with discussions of architecture, the psychology of cults, and Finnegan's Wake (Scott Miller); or the cunning to recognize one's catchiest phrases combined with the good graces to encrypt everything else using the latest algorithms (Tori Amos). Or, for that matter, all of the above delivered with an obvious determination to bring us all universal truths, and the ability to convince me, at least, of one's ability to do so (Dar Williams, Jane Siberry). Where I start mentally sneering "post-Alanis" - and again, like "post-DOWNWARD SPIRAL", this is not my shot at the imitated, but at the imitators - is where some mainstream debut artist I've never met, such as Julia Darling, tells me "I've a voice now, deeper than you/ I would advise you, open your eyes". Or "today the sun was shining just to blind me". Or, worst of all, on the very first song, having the nerve to solicit God and all the saints for a bit of stress relief. It later occurred to me that this last practice is known as "prayer" and is practiced by literally billions of people, but God probably doesn't mind hearing the occasional "hey, thanks for all the help creating us, how's your son doin'?" first, either.
Part of this immediate reaction to Darling's songs was personal and frankly irrational. The only people I've ever learned to expect unprompted discourses on feeling from have been girls I used to date, and while they all were (are) intelligent, full of creative energy, and intendedly kind, they also ended up striking me as neurotics with an irreversible tendency to lay conversational landmines. Only once in my life, if that, did I need to hear someone I cared about wonder "I feel sort of happy right now, but is it _real_ happiness or am I deluding myself?" -- a few more than one times later, I have a hair-trigger sensitivity to anyone new who strikes me as prone to the question. But Julia doesn't, in fact, ask it. She does base one of her love songs around the premise that "I was faulty then, I am faulty now, but you never judge me", and I have a learned tendency to silently reply "please, please don't be _too_ sure of that", but maybe you don't, and good on you.
As a broader premise, I do seriously doubt that excess introspection is a good way to learn about oneself. When your direct course of study is your own experiences bounced off your own thoughts, the common result is a positive feedback effect in which any two contradictory thoughts might, with equal ease, energetically seek allies until one's dubious accretion of biased evidence hardens into certainty, in that same way that Darling's love songs "Soak Me" and "You", her this-hurts-me-more-than-it-hurts-you dumping song "Closer Look", and her unremittingly hostile "Bury You" could easily, for all I know, be sung to the same person. I do occasionally bury me in navel-gazing, but anything useful I've learned about myself these past few years, I've learned either through condensing my experiences into cool stories for friends who weren't there (so I can hear their stories that I missed); or by designing the city or school system I'll build next time I inherit $400 million; or by switching to some new job category with new customs and people every six months; or through learning about supposedly unrelated topics of inherent interest (evolution, psychology, artificial intelligence, pop music) and encountering a sudden "Aha!". In other words, by soliciting outside data, and soliciting it _for its own sake_, creating a reality check, and eliminating the tendency to let a detailed reminiscence like Darling's "Crinolines and Waltzing" fade off, with no apparent irony, into haze that simply has to be falsehood: "Highland's classroom anecdotes/ meet me at the flagpole notes/ perfect photographic lives/ the star, the heart, yin yang and peace" -- which is confused, but not really complexified, by the later vagaries of "No one ever cried the way we cried/…/ I remember messing up".
If I really thought her certainties were felt as they were expressed, I'd probably find FIGURE 8 intolerable. But on any fair reading, she recognizes her own confusion, and her demands seem fair enough. "Overloading God" beseeches God, but only for the mental strength to be independent of thought (lamenting "my bridges slowly burn/ I'm turning into Them" and insisting that "I'm here, behind my smile"), and "Bulletproof Belief" acknowledges the contradiction and admits her need to rely on her own bulletproof belief in, well, she'll know what when she finds it. "Soak Me"'s hyperbole about the sun is indeed meant as hyperbole, part of the eloquent lovers' plea "today I knew my thoughts were out to get me/ my face full of lines meant for thirty/…/ today was meant for a body stronger/ could you soak me?". Anyone has been shied by "memories that bite my tongue"; and if Julia seems to operate on the common belief that such memories are painful but healthy, in need of nurture, it's not her fault.
Freeing me, at last, to enjoy the music. To enjoy it quite a lot, in fact. Loosely, it fits the category of JAGGED LITTLE PILL: Julia's voice and delivery are quite a lot like a de-mannered Alanis, the songs are midtempo, and the majority of choruses surge on schedule. But I'd give her music three substantial advantages over formula. One, she's a very talented tunesmith -- in the Morissette vein, but risking calculated leaps and poorly marked trails, successfully. Two is the sheer variety. "26/23", a tale of sibling rivalry, is built on cello and vibes, timpani and the occasional rifleshot snares of a World War II documentary. "Crinolines…", gorgeously understated, has an underlying groove of didjeridoo and bagpipes, fragmented vocal harmonies, and an attractive if largely illegible spoken-word section. "My Face", a song in which her self-examination does seem to have yielded insights she wants to keep, could be a Sheryl Crow song that avoids the chorus. "Closer Look" wafts by prettily as a non-rock folk song, decorated by autoharp and whirring Hammond B-3.
Finally, though, there's the sheer impressive attention to detail. Sidemen I've actually heard of - Benmont Tench, Patrick Warren, Tony Berg, and Jon Brion do not come cheap - thoughtfully decorate the songs with just the right amounts of crescendo and decrescendo, electric and acoustic guitar, organ and piano, fake-strings and fake-trombone and even (on "You") some persuasive industrial churn. Julia delivers her own vocals with just as much care to supple, non-histrionic expression. No, "Soak Me"'s JAGGED impression isn't "loosely" at all. Yes, you've heard the four guitar chords of "Bulletproof…" a thousand times before. But you didn't hear them quite like this, and to me, you really seem to be missing out.
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