Yail, if you like Vic, I definitely would recommend Danny Cohen's We're All Gunna Die
Yeah, check out this pompous Salon review. I disagree with all of it. If Blanchfield can't hear the grit and truth in songs like "Parade" and "Prick," he can parade his prick to some other dude than me:
Vic Chesnutt
THE SALESMAN AND BERNADETTE | CAPRICORN RECORDS
BY BRIAN BLANCHFIELD | It's what felled Lou Barlow and Sebadoh, it strikes painfully at Will Oldham and Palace, but it happens most consistently to Vic Chesnutt. It's self-indulgence, and when it comes to love-loss, it means the saps tend to privilege the hit-or-miss surrealism of their private lyrics over the art of the song.
On his new album, "The Salesman and Bernadette," Chesnutt sacrifices the old locked-in-his-mother's-cupboard tortured freakishness to sing about a specific and adult loss of love. The result is 14 tracks of piddling about the house and hotel room, where he's too beset with loneliness to be nihilistic (or fun) anymore.
Punk-inspired, self-deprecatory, difficult folk music can be endearing when all of its elements -- the principled emasculation, the (nonetheless memorable) uncatchiness, the likewise bald literary allusions -- conspire. And "The Salesman and Bernadette" does retain some of the qualities that were so rightly in place on Chesnutt's icy, enchanting 1988 album "Little" -- hit-or-miss surrealism does, after all, get its hits in: "Last night I nearly killed myself chasing rum with rum. There were crows flying all around my head and I sure caught and ate me some" Chesnutt sings on "Square Room."
Chesnutt's compositions are more challenging here than on his last album, "About to Choke" (Capitol). There are 15 musicians, including Kurt Wagner and the brassy experimental Nashville outfit Lambchop. Lyrical flashes on songs like "Maiden" and "Scratch, Scratch, Scratch" work because they fit the accompanying instrumentation. Other tracks make one embarrassed that he implicated so many other talented musicians in his solipsistic exercise. Chesnutt plays piano while everyone else sings the lyrics of "Blanket Over the Head," here in its entirety: "We will remain ignorant, incapable of knowing. Insoluble is the problem. Curiosity, sleeping, killed the caterpillar. Curiosity, empty, is a blanket over the head."
Chesnutt has a niche closer to country than rock, and he's often compared to absurdist balladeers Joe Henry and Leonard Cohen. Cohen's famous blue raincoat may someday fit, but Chesnutt must first figure out what material is material to art.
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