Camper Van Beethoven
Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart

It is like recognizing the essence of a soul.

“Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart” is a sacred circle drawn in a profane world: intimacy, escapes, rituals, healings, earth, rain, and warmth. Everything flows towards a point of arrival and meeting. It is like having listened well to your own story, becoming benevolently familiar, pressing the imprint of your own soul. And telling yourself: you were born where it happened (Redlands, San Bernardino County!), you have some abilities and many limitations, you have the few opportunities that are due to you, you have the single purpose of being the Camper Van B. at your best! Do not wish to be anyone else. Perhaps, even, already being almost all (like Holy Modal Rounders, Modern Lovers, Grateful Dead, etc.).

Epigones, the only, of Kaleidoscope (USA). Heirs of their eclecticism, they transplant it into the '80s. Originally, from the quirky perspective of ska. Arriving at a flourishing folk-rock-psychedelic idiom. Indie, yes, with the breath of musicians who play in freedom (David Lowery, vocals and guitar, and Jonathan Segel, violin and keyboards). The fourth work, first for a major, slightly cleaned up from the charming scruffy and grainy patina until the day before, is under the hegemony, if not dictatorship, of Lowery; it emphasizes conciseness, with structures more resolved in the song format compared to the immediate predecessor but no less creative and reflective. Sparkles of flashes of genius are not lacking, vivid, mad, of what was, initially, defined by themselves as “surrealist absurdist folk.” The tracks, never unresolved, are part of a dynamic fusion of genres, urgent, compressed, in a sonic hybridism that entices and is never juxtaposition or overlap. Then we add the elegant irreverence (who does not remember among the old batch titles “The Day That Lassie Went to the Moon,” “Take the Skinheads Bowling,” or “ZZ Top Go To Egypt”?), their sardonic and rebellious knowledge, yet devoid of poisons or resentments, instead devoted to understanding (yet abhorred by the “piercing eyebrows of mama”). Thus “Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart” is a disheveled but perfectly balanced, chirpy but endemic summary, full of pathos and slippery wit: folk, hard rock, punk rock, country, waltz, ethnic music, acid rock, funky hints (praiseworthy Victor Krummenacher on bass!). All in a paradoxically classical dimension.

“Eye Of Fatima (Pt. 1 & 2)” is a country rock ballad, full of strangely jovial punky pitfalls, that changes, with no more similarities in the second part, into raga rock; “Change Your Mind” a contagious and swinging waltz on languid horns; “My Path Belated” the violin’s serpentine lines and the hyperkinesis of a killer chorus; “Tania” is dedicated to the curious story of Patricia Campbell Hearst, daughter of wealthy Californian entrepreneurs, who in '74 was kidnapped by an urban guerrilla group (the Symbionese Liberation Army), which demanded as ransom the distribution of 400 million dollars to the poor; however, Patricia, sympathizing with her captors, then became “Tania,” herself their accomplice and bank robber. Finally, “She Divines Water”: a whimsical folk song, like a polymorphic and dizzying embrace, with a convulsive finale, an absurd cut-up, and a peaceful instrumental coda. A shining text:

“How can I believe that everything in this world will be fine? How can I believe that everything in this world has its place and its time? When I lie down to sleep, I feel the world spinning slightly off-axis, it has the shape of a fig! And when I am next to you, I tremble and fear. You tell me that you love me and I dream of being awake”.

“Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart” is, in short, the soul of a naughty boy who spits pellets but does not hide the blowpipe nor his deep gaze. It is the portrait of “our most beloved revolutionary sweetheart” because he always has a big heart amidst the lungs. It is the portrait of a soul.