EASY TO BELIEVE Carll Wilkinson.
|
With the talent we have in this town, just about anybody can put together a decent-sounding album. You pick up a few of the dozens of great studio musicians who're kicking around, team up with a Jonathan Wyman/Frank Hopkins/Marc Bartholomew/Pete Morse/Jim Begley type to engineer and produce, and have Adam Ayan master the whole thing, and, whammo: Start planning the CD-release party.
And sometimes that's all that's really there — some whammo, some good studio production, and some well-played instruments. Ten songs later, I've completely forgotten whose name was on the outside of the packaging.
So why am I still playing this Carll Wilkinson album (minus a couple tunes I left off the iPod)? Well, even though his upgrade from voice and a guitar on his debut Pomegranate to full-band treatment with Morse — plus drummer Stefan Samuels (Eldemur Krimm) and pianist Tom Snow — smelled initially of album-by-numbers, the new Working Poor Blues is literate and lyrical, and Wilkinson has a voice you can fall for in a hurry. The songs are still about love and loss, universal struggle, all the shit singer/songwriters write about all the time, but Wilkinson does it better than most.
Quite simply, I believe him. When "the season's killing me/It's breaking me at the knees" in the "Season," I can feel his pain. It's why he can get away with a too-easy metaphor (winter=my girl left) and not leave you cold.
Part of it's his delivery, a way of melding timbre and breathiness to create real desperation, sometimes clipped and pained like Dave Matthews, sometimes elongated and haunted like Ray LaMontagne. In the middle is something like Steve Winwood or Mark Cohn, blending in some '80s riffs (just a touch of cheese from time to time) and getting all-souled-out (but not in a Pete Rock and CL Smooth kind of way). You get the idea he'd be fine without the full-band treatment, after all.
But the rolling bass note that opens "Start the Whole Damn Thing Over" is grounding, and when the organ rings a single note for three measures before dancing with the piano, it's something worth listening to. Maybe by the end, when the "ahh-ahh" backing vocals enter, things get a little crowded, but it probably would have worked fine without the fade-out finish, which almost universally feels like a cop-out.
A few songs fade out, actually, which isn't half as bad as the repeated tactic of building in the drums for the second verse, and increasing instrumentation as songs go on, in general. This archetype is rife throughout the Portland scene right now, from metal to folk, and it's getting old in a hurry. It hurts "Redemption & Grace" the most, which is a mid-album respite in the beginning, with a passionate first verse that rips at the heart strings — "I've been broken/Drunk and disheveled/Battered and grim" — before turning into every folk-rock song you've ever heard. The whole crashing in of the extra instruments is so predictable, even if the bouncing piano chords are pretty cool in the chorus.
Also, I wouldn't bother much with "The Wedding Song" or the title track, which are like reading pulp fiction among literature, both of them trying too obviously to accomplish too much.
But "10,000 Years," featuring a central acoustic guitar hook, is terrifically nuanced without being overwhelming. The opening couplet has so much to say: "I don't believe in California/I've never seen that coast-lined state." On an album where Wilkinson tries to evince the everyman, this is the best portrait. The protagonist here doesn't believe in California because he can't. He doesn't have time for it — the governator, Barbara Boxer, Malibu, Hollywood, and the rest aren't anything that could ever seem real when you're trying to make ends meet in Maine.
Nor is he playing to the masses, though. He's talking about reading the Iliad and 10,000 years of human history, and what it is we've all come to. "You gotta put this life together/Day to day and week to week/There ain't nothing that comes easy/There ain't nothing that comes cheap." It's a truism, and it's simple, but it isn't simplistic, and as an organic wash of noise builds into the song, it's like the coming weight of the future, eventually enveloping the song until everything finishes in a snap of silence.
"I can't tell if I'm all out of luck/Or just didn't have much luck to start," Wilkinson wonders during "In the Flood," an epitome of the way he can capture the essence of resignation. And during a rainy season when it feels like the sun will never come out again, it's easy to sympathize, whether you're working, poor, or something else entirely.
Sam Pfeifle can be reached at sam_pfeifle@yahoo.com .
The Working Poor Blues |Released by Carll Wilkinson | with Pete Morse | at the North Star Music Café, in Portland | July 16 | www.carllwilkinson.com
