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'Room 29' is a concept album dedicated to one of Hollywood's myths, the Chateau Marmont Hotel on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.
Built in 1929 according to the plans of architect William Douglas Lee modeled after the Chateau d'Amboise located in the namesake town on the Loire in France, the residence was completely renovated and converted into a hotel in 1931.
The fact that in 1976 it was designated as a true historical-cultural monument and as such an artistic heritage of the city of Los Angeles is not surprising. I mean, we're in Los Angeles, on Sunset Boulevard, how could this place not become a true place of worship? Practically all the most influential artists in the history of cinema, music, and entertainment have passed through the Chateau Marmont, staying there either as simple guests or as residents, and in several cases, they have drawn true inspiration from this 'mythical' place even for what is their artistic production.
In 1982, John Belushi was found dead inside the Chateau Marmont. He was staying in Bungalow 3.
Sofia Coppola shot her 2010 film 'Somewhere' there with Stephen Dorff and former starlet Elle Fanning, probably her most interesting work and the one in which, in some way, pursuing one of the typical conceptual intentions and purposes of her 'thought' (thus her cinema), she shows us how truly devoid of consistency and content this fantastic reality that appears to us as the world of celebrities is.
A film that, if we want, is itself a 'contradiction' and at the same time an affirmation and a denial of the criticism that Sofia Coppola, moreover, would direct first and foremost at herself, having been practically born and raised in this 'world'.
Anyway, Jarvis Cocker stayed at the Chateau Marmont, specifically in room number 29 (which is particularly furnished, among other things, with a grand piano), for the first time in 2012 while on tour with Pulp in the United States. In some way, more or less artificially, he also decided he was deeply inspired by this experience to the point of wanting to write an album about it four or five years later.
I say he was more or less artificially inspired by this experience because his work is not an 'original' work. That is, it is a work with unpublished content; all are new songs, never written or heard before, but the concept on which the entire work is centered is precisely the various stories told about the Chateau Marmont and what were the experiences and works of the great characters who stayed there and impregnated the walls of this hotel with their art.
It is a project, let's say ambitious, that besides foreseeing the realization of the album (released on March 17 through Deutsche Grammophon) also envisions the staging of a real theatrical show that Cocker wrote with film historian David Thomson.
As for the album and its contents, this was instead realized as a four-hand collaboration with Canadian pianist, producer, and singer-songwriter Chilly Gonzales (real name: Jason Charles Beck), a serial collaborator of Feist, Peaches, and Mocky and also engaged as a musician in the universe of electronic and experimental music, and it also benefits from the collaboration with flautist Nathalie Hauptman, French musician Hasko Kroeger, and singer Maud Techa.
The scheme of the sixteen songs that make up the album is always the same: essentially, Chilly Gonzales plays the piano, accompanied by orchestrations from the other project members, and Jarvis Cocker sometimes sings, sometimes literally recites (they call it 'spoken word') the lyrics he wrote in homage to the Chateau Marmont and its myth.
It is an album whose musical contents could be defined as Central European, reminiscent of decadent atmospheres, dusty environments, and cigarette smoke. From Lou Reed's 'Berlin' to Marianne Faithfull's theatrical expressionism, to the dramatic nature of the more minimalistic Ryuichi Sakamoto, and here and there, Daniel Johnston's verbal 'gesture' peeks through.
Nevertheless, I would not define it as a repetitive work.
This is certainly not the reason that could discourage the listener from approaching this work but rather the fact that although this seemingly constitutes a 'tribute' and a concept album dedicated to an imaginary that is mostly mythical, even fantastic for those events that are farther back in time, it appears to us, on the other hand, instead as a completely self-referential work in which Jarvis Cocker claims to appropriate these stories and make them his own.
But he doesn't succeed. The souls of the people whose lives he wants to narrate escape him faster than the notes of Chilly Gonzales' piano, and all that remains are not men and women but only characters.
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