I See A Lupus
You don’t hear too much “golden years” music in indie-rock. That sort of work — written by musicians whose best achievements are largely in the past, who have grown settled and comfortable and slightly tame — is far more common in classic rock and other, more prosperous genres. Maybe you need to have attained a real star in order to do this — Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton can keep turning out unremarkable albums about their wives and no one much bothers them about it, but even the most accomplished independent music acts have to wrap an aging fist-hold over their remaining scraps of youth in order to remain viable. Guided By Voices and Sonic Youth aren’t really allowed to mellow. Age isn’t kind to indie-rock: the window opens at twenty and usually slams shut by thirty-five. Most bands make their mark and quickly exit the stage, so grizzled veterans are comparatively rare. Superwolf is the work of two such veterans, so much so that the back cover photo of Will Oldham and Matt Sweeney looks hilariously like something that ought to go into the dictionary next to the entry for “grizzled.” They look like bums. Each man has made his mark on music in younger days, so the questions that come to my mind when I’m looking at this photo are: What motivates them? Why are they here?
If the two men are here to prove something, Matt Sweeney probably has more to prove than Will Oldham does. Oldham has already attained indie-classic status under his Palace and Bonnie “Prince” Billy monikers. 1999’s I See a Darkness was a phenomenal and career-defining album. A lot of rock albums, even the best ones, are just great ear candy at their core; I See a Darkness was a work of art. It’s the best “freak-folk” album I’ve ever heard, even though it predates that term by five years. Sweeney, on the other hand, has a name more obscure. His best work was with Chavez, a math-rock outfit that had a fierce cult following but never really broke through to wide notoriety, even of the underground sort. Among a certain sort of rockist, Chavez mattered fiercely. Their best works are perfect, trebly anthems that seem to specialize in inspiring fist-pumps in the most finicky and uninspirable sort of guitar aficionado. Later, Sweeney was in Billy Corgan’s abortive Zwan. Interesting character. These days he is cast as a sort of wandering underground guitar hero, playing live and in session with various obscure notables.
The first question to be settled about Superwolf is how the two men’s styles mesh. Superwolf is a bit too bluesy and electrified to sound much like a Bonnie “Prince” Billy record, and it’s far too calm to sound like Chavez. The only immediately recognizable elements are Oldham’s voice and playfully mordant lyrics. These make Superwolf sound, at first listen, like an unequal mixture: two parts Billy to one part Matt. (Bonnie “Prince” Billy is credited with the words, Sweeney with the music. The liner notes suggest that Oldham did his part and then challenged Sweeney to write fit accompaniment.) But the album is not made merely by the proportioning of existent elements; it is a new creation. Neither man has made much of a history of sounding like a bluesman, yet on Superwolf they both do. The blues tone is not constant throughout, but it opens the record in the jaunty “My Home Is the Sea,” which sounds like a juke-joint number from the land where aging, pasty rockers go after they’re put out to pasture. I imagine Jay Farrar and some guys from Slint smiling along and stomping their feet on a sawdust-covered floor. More subdued but even more playful is “What Are You?” which contains one of Oldham’s characteristically lewd stabs of humor. The song is a vocal duet written from the perspective of a woman, and both men gleefully harmonize the lyric: “What are you waiting for? / It must be me / to take you over my knee / and spank you mercilessly / I can do that / oh you’ll see.”
My only problem with this record is that I suspect it of being conceived out of boredom. Both Oldham and Sweeney are consummate musicians, foremost among their peers, and consistently interesting. And this is a very good record: eleven tracks of metallic tenderness and subdued beauty, with no dead spots to be found. Superwolf marks its own quietly unique territory, one that mines the theme of the strife of love for emotional resonance. Still, that resonance is a little too quiet and subdued for my taste. It plays at too low a volume. All the songs here are good, and their cumulative effect makes this album worth owning, but I don’t find much greatness. The next time I want to be imbued with a feeling of pleasant, hopeful loneliness, or consoled out of a patch of romantic strife, I’ll probably put Superwolf on and be soothed. But, save for one song, there aren’t any tracks here that blow the top of my head off, or that I want to play over and over again.
If there is a climax to this album, it’s in the final two songs. The eight-minute “Blood Embrace” courts tediousness but culminates in a hypnotic dialogue sample that goes uncredited but sounds lifted from a flim. A woman gives a whispered confession that begins: “Charlie…I’ve ah…I’ve been with another man…Aren’t you gonna say anything? You just gonna sit there?” She tries to explain herself until the man, after a long silence, cuts her off: “I don’t think I’m up for any more of this. Why don’t you go on to bed.” “What are you gonna do?” the woman asks. The man responds: “I’m just gonna sit here.” This sample seems to announce cuckolding as a long-buried theme for the album, and it raises the record’s emotional tension, paving the way for the last and most powerful track, the heartbroken “I Gave You.” If this album has a legacy it will be this song, which has a piercing, cinematic mournfulness. It’s the aural equivalent of a Sam Shepherd drama — I can already hear it playing over shots of wide, fallow countryside as a man speeds away from the climactic scene of some wrenching break-up.
Billy and The Sweendog (as the partnership is referred to in the liner notes) may not be out to make career-defining work with Superwolf, but from the sounds of it, even their idle hours produce a few minutes of timelessness.
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