Review by Rainy Dawg Radio DJ C-Mart (co-host of Electro Lounge every Tuesday from 4-6 PM PST).
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White Wilderness marks singer-songwriter John Vanderslice’s first album-length collaboration; it might also be his most vulnerable. Recorded in just over three days in San Francisco, the album oscilates between soft-footed chamber-pop and neo-classical undulations which could have set the cinematic score for the next Wes Anderson flick. If only.
Perhaps due to the recording’s time frame, the album carries an urgency in tone that has been absent from Vanderslice’s more constructed, studio releases. Gone are the guitar and drum distortions of Cellar Door and Emerald City, in their place are the interlineations of Minna Choi and her curiously named Magik*Magik Orchestra. Under Choi’s command, the orchestra creates such devilishly haunting countermelodies that Vanderslice’s lyrics can be, and often are, consumed by them, and the sense of his storytelling often emerges, briefly, as though coming up for air.
Gasping, then, are the lyrics themselves. Usually sharp in his storytelling, Vanderslice seems here a bit unclear what kind of story he wants to tell. The descriptive quasi-political setting of Gaza in ‘Sea Salt’ may remind the attentive listener of Cuba from ‘Heated Pool and Bar’ off Cellar Door, but the song lacks the continuity and perspective that give Vanderslice’s other political songs their power. Opposing this current, ‘White Wilderness’ and ‘The Alemany Gap’ veer toward the folk styling found in Life and Death of an American Fourtracker. The first two lyrics of ‘Alemany’ – ‘This town is a deceptively cold place/with the Alemany gap darkening out your face’ – are awkwardly sung in order to fit them into the song’s meter, and the rest is merely ho hum.
While the lyrics may be weaker than his usual fare, the album’s strength is in the interplay between Vanderslice’s vocals and Choi’s orchestration. There are times when the Vanderslice/Choi collaboration creates a subtle and explosive synergy and the album reaches heights familiar to the best from Pixel Revolt. ‘The Piano Lesson,’ which is apparently about a real piano lesson, plays with dissonant patterns of piano, saxophone, and violin, and manages to galvanize these in subtle and striking ways. Likewise, ’20k’ reaches for the sublime while at the same time seems to be resisting it.
White Wilderness often walks a fine line between the emotional and the sympathetic. Parts of the melodiously sad ‘English Vines’ reaches a nice balance between the two, though toward the end of the song Choi’s work feels slightly oppressive. ‘The Overcoat’ and ‘Convict Lake,’ two of the best on the album, trend toward similar fates, but fare better overall. Despite some excellent additions to the Vanderslice canon, White Wilderness as an album doesn’t offer stand-out songs (except maybe ‘The Piano Lesson’), and feels a bit, well, colorless as a result.
While it might not be an entry point for new listeners to the Vanderslice corpus, it is a welcome departure in the veteran songwriter’s career that fans will definitely appreciate. At only half-an-hour, one wonders what kind of album a few more days – maybe a month – of recording and some more tinkering could have produced.
Despite this, or perhaps because of it, White Wilderness is so intensely woven that it’s sometimes hard to unravel, but it demands that you do so. Its threads are visible, teasing you to pull at them, to see the album for all its complexity and vulnerability. That’s well and good, and I’m more than willing to do so. I’m just not so sure it won’t come apart as a result.
-Chris Martin
