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Rating:
Almost three years of silence, never before in his career.
Three years of silence saved and interrupted by a couple of releases for collectors. Three years of silence and the desire to detach and distance himself from that emotional and harmonious past that had characterized his last years in music. Increasingly distant from those drone experiments combined with torrents of notes that in twenty to twenty-five-minute barrels, it wasn't strange for them to surface among his very melodic productions.
The melody, for a good half an hour, today we forget it.
A skewed, crooked, scratched, improvised, noisy record, no denying it: annoying.
There are the heaviest, punkest, most electric tracks from Ben.
It feels like an electroshock to the fringes of the self of good old dear calm and always appropriate Ben.
Let's say it here: appropriate, my ass. You burp at the dinner table in front of Martina, the brand-new little niece that Aunt Francy has been showing off for hours as if she were a new pair of earrings.
Pretentious, very pretentious. The most "I've got a big dick" record of Ben's entire career, there's little to say, there's little to do, the evidence travels between anvil and hammer.
Pretentious and deliberately seeking complex branches and intellectual peaks yes... No! Let's not say jazz, thank you.
After Dscent and the pop/easy-listening aura it carried with it, it was inevitable (not really, it's just a phrase thrown in there to give a professional tone to a purely personal page).
Half the album or almost is black Earth, and it explains to Carlson that, all in all, his group left something to posterity. Something for real, that goes beyond the drone game, the quote in the niche magazine interview and so on. A discussion that starts with the Earth and that through the "noise made in Chasney" surpasses country as a signature trait of the Texans.
And then oh well, it's an album that does a lot of other things too, because music is notes, words are letters, and if you expect me to explain all this "a lot of other things" to you, you're firstly overestimating me and secondly disappointing me: because you know I don't feel like it, be satisfied with what comes.
Which in reality is true: I wish I could and knew how to talk about it better. Because it's a point of arrival, and even if it shouldn't necessarily become a new starting point, even if Ben were to return to repeat his past and start re-weaving dreams as he has done almost uninterruptedly for these 17 years; well, this album is something. I haven't figured out what yet, but it's something. It transcends the value of a record and transforms into that thing that, maybe because I'm a fan, makes you say, "see, I was right: this guy's not just good, he should go down in history.”
Or maybe not, maybe it was just two and a half years since I'd heard anything of his and I was simply in withdrawal.
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