What do you get when you intermingle the sensibilities and staple motifs of every globally celebrated pop act from the last forty-five years with some of the great melodic outsiders and misfits from the same period? That's the question Patrick Watson asks (and answers) with Wooden Arms – an album have would see Syd Barrett, Edgard Varèse, the entire cast from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Mothers Of Invention and The Magic Band sit down to dine and talk shop with the Wainwright family, Tricky, Tom Waits, Mark Oliver Everett, Cliff Friend and Dave Franklin if it had its way. The proposition seems head-spinning but is apt as Wooden Arms successfully re-imagines the core timbres of every sound it touches on; ominous Italian trad (think the score from The Godfather) turns wistful on the title track here, while lilting strings will melt even the most hardened listener's heart in “Hommage” before shocking them with luminescent and mercurial Waitsian oompah in “Traveling Salesman.”
So what's the answer? What could you get from such a divine artistic summit/buffet as that imagined above? If the sounds contained on Wooden Arms are any indication, such a collaboration would be totally unclassifiable from a musical standpoint, but it's wholly fascinating and engrossing because, from the metabolic start-up of “Fireweed,” Wooden Arms resonates like the finest body rock ever imagined into existence. From the opening dervish spin of “Fireweed” which builds melodically from silence to orchestral swell to delicate but difficult choral wails and guitar arpeggios, Watson sets a bizarre but captivating and lush table that covers every course from wistful vocals to harrowing modal undercurrents to percussive, factory-sounding creations and offers listeners a seat to take it all in. The meal is light but filling given the number of courses and brims with unusual but sweet and savory flavor combinations.
Part of the sweetness lies in the contrasts that are contained in each song. Listeners find a comfortable and shady spot to view the tangles between densely layered percussion that includes everything from the finest orchestral implements to rattled shovels and instruments including string sections, cascading piano lines and delirious surf-tremolo-ed guitars. It's a sensory-depriving experience and, standing front, center and strongly before it all is Watson – the magician himself – conducting and projecting his own voice over this beautiful cacophony. As big or bracing or earth-quaking as the sounds may get in songs like “Beijing,” “Traveling Salesman,” “Where The Wild Things Are” or “Machinery Of The Heavens,” they dare not tread too closely to the singer's space. He illustrates at every step along the way through these eleven tracks that he is their master and he controls them. It's a remarkable listening experience – like the aural equivalent to watching Moses part the Red Sea – and his unassuming and even meek vocal delivery seals the deal by sweet-talking every heart within earshot.
Even so and with all of that said, reading this review might seem vague somehow. The textures and re-conditioned timbres are breathtaking – but you can't read them because no words neatly sum up such a sonic sprawl as that found on Wooden Arms; you must hear them. In that way, the album is the epitome of what good music should be:
it
takes
you
somewhere and,
while you
might
not
understand the trip,
the
ride
is
the
thing.
Artist:
Patrick Watson online
Patrick Watson myspace
Album:
Wooden Arms is out now and available here on Amazon .
