Pitchfork
Review:
Christian Kiefer and Jefferson
Pitcher
To All Dead Sailors
[Camera Obscura; 2007]
Rating: 7.5
Christian Kiefer and Jefferson
Pitcher aren't the most obvious of collaborators. Kiefer is an
indie-folk balladeer that parlays his gentle voice and dusky acoustic
guitar into haunting blurs of tone and melody (think a dronier
Iron & Wine). Pitcher is a Northern Californian sound artist
that explores the possibilities of field recordings, feedback,
and prepared guitars. Then again, Kiefer habitually renders the
naturalistic strange, while Pitcher makes the strange sound natural.
On this nautically themed collaboration, which purportedly draws
inspiration from the poetry of Pablo Neruda and the fiction of
Jose Saramago, Kiefer and Pitcher find each other precisely at
the seam where their mirror-image aesthetics meet. As a result,
there are no jarring moments when one collaborator overtakes the
other. To All Dead Sailors displays a fluid undulation from starry
indie-folk to inert sound collage and back again, never breaking
its lulling wave-like motion along the way.
Kiefer and Pitcher share vocal duties on the album, and their
voices will make or break this project for most listeners: In
a mostly understated record, they're as overt as a neon signs,
and their inflections can be tender to the point of preciosity.
But as long as you've a decently high threshold for the saccharine,
they're terrific-- both singers sound gracefully open and velvety,
playing off of each other so seamlessly that it's difficult to
tell where one ends and the other begins. The vocal presence on
this album can evoke Rufus Wainwright when it's low, with subtle
vibrato; Ben Gibbard when it's high and airy; Holopaw's John Orth
when tensed and straining, always moving without friction between
these modes.
To All Dead Sailors, mirroring the singers' tone, is dense with
longing. Each song seems to strain against the boundary of its
simple instrumental palette, as if the depth of feeling contained
inside exceeds the size of the well. After a mood-setting field
recording of waves and seagulls, "Ship Under Sand" slowly
gathers a melancholy electric guitar figure and bending foghorn-like
tones into an ominous dirge, which spills into "The Captain",
a chiming hymn that features the first instance of the recurring
lyrical and melodic motif, "Oh Captain, bring me home."
Kiefer and Pitcher invoke this captain throughout the album, alternately
in tones of salvation and damnation: "The Captain leads the
ship into the rocks/ The watchmen will sleep there with the fishes,"
Kiefer warns on the banjo-flecked lullaby "Carpenters and
Sailors". "Erendira and the Ocean" features the
first reprise of the "Oh Captain" refrain, this time
amid bright flashes of nylon strings. The sparse instrumentation
and existential despair of "Burial at Sea" evoke Damien
Jurado at his most retiring, and "Astrolabe" is a churning
trail song (although the trail happens to lead to Mars).
Pitcher's experimental presence flickers through all of these
otherwise trad tunes, and becomes overt in the elegant abstract
passages that interleave them. "Marconi Brings the Cypher"
finds Kiefer's thinned-out voice tracing a fragile melody through
vanishing chimes; it's equal parts the submerged rumble of Sailor
Winters and the nebulous discomfort of early Nick Drake. "The
Engineer's Dream" barely exists; it's just a music box tinkle
buried in a distant roar. The curtains of reverb-heavy guitar
on "The Mermaid and the Drunks" grind down nauseously,
like a radio expending the last of its battery charge.
Given the glut of indie-folk records that render the sea's mysteries
in similar trappings-- sampled birds, weary harmonies, and dusty
acoustic strings-- you couldn't be blamed for finding the conceit
a bit tiresome by now. But this duo's sly embellishments, potent
voices, and weighty songwriting makes To All Dead Sailors well-worth
enlisting for one more voyage. Bonus points for not succumbing
to the siren song of the sea chantey, one of indie music's most
overused tricks as of late.
-Brian Howe, November 16, 2007
|
