Still Got Legs - Chameleon Circuit
Chameleon Circuit is a British band whose music is inspired by and mostly about the TV series Doctor Who. But don’t think that this means it’s inaccessible or unenjoyable by those who don’t know or like the show. Not that you necessarily would like it regardless of your familiarity with the show, or that understanding the references doesn’t provide a large part of its enjoyability for some, but... you know. Just like you don’t have to be religious to enjoy hymns, you don’t have to be a Doctor Who fan to like this. But it helps.
This is the group’s second album, and refers to events and characters from season 5 (a.k.a. Matt Smith’s first season) and the end of season 4 (a.k.a. David Tennant's last season), as well as stand-alone specials that occur between them. This review will not contain spoilers for the show, but the lyrics of the songs do, so be warned.
The sound of the album contains elements of punk rock and light metal, and ranges from spookily distorted to jangly and cheerful, from wholly synthesized to stripped-down acoustic. The tunes are mostly original, but often refer in varying degrees to themes and melodies from the soundtrack of the show, providing musical as well as lyrical connections for the attentive listener.
Individual songs are mostly first-person explorations of characters and situations, and are very well-written and expressively sung. Most of them are pretty glum, such as Everything Is Ending and Mr. Pond. But a few, such as Still Not Ginger and Teenage Rebel, are much more cheery. Teenage Rebel, in particular, is my favorite track, an excellent running song, and in my opinion the least explicitly Doctor Who-related - in other words, it could easily be interpreted as being relatable by many different listeners for many different reasons. Its fast-paced punky sound is infectiously upbeat, and its words are optimistic and self-confident: “I won’t ever stop / ‘cause I know what’s right / get in my way, I will burst into light / I’ll keep dying and living and changing my ways / but I was a teenage rebel and that stayed the same.”
One song, Big Bang Two, breaks the first-person pattern in favor of a blow-by-blow synopsis of season 5‘s finale from the perspective of a flabbergasted viewer. Since this song is all about how confusing the series can be even for longtime fans, it may also be accessible to non-fans who are equally bemused by the whole thing. But, like I said... spoilers.
I find this album pretty fun to listen to. I’ve been taught to be wary of metamedia (for lack of a better term) - art that builds upon or refers to some other art. It’s sometimes regarded as derivitive, unimaginitive, or even as plagiaristic. But I definitely have a few such items in my collection, and I’m not about to be ashamed of that. Let’s just say: this is a good album. It’s definitely worth checking out if you’re a fan of Doctor Who, and possibly worth checking out regardless.
Next: Telepathic Last Words
Friday, August 29, 2014
Saturday, August 23, 2014
All My CDs, pt 21 - Rattlin' Bones
Rattlin’ Bones - Kasey Chambers and Shane Nicholson
There’s a lot of variability in my music collection. Some of it is popular, some obscure. Some is vouched-for by those with genuine Good Taste, and some is scorned by those very ears. When I describe music as good, it is often with the disclaimer that this is only my opinion, sometimes shared by few. In the case of this album - the collaborative product of Kasey Chambers and Shane Nicholson - I can say with confidence that it is, objectively, one of the best albums I own. Listen to it.
I mean that even if you, as a rule, shun country music. This album is unmistakably country, but old-school country, and from where I stand seems to have more in common with folk rock than a lot of modern country music. It also has a lot of good stuff that transcendes genre distinctions and is just all-around good. Regardless of your preferred genres, listen.
As the title might suggest, the mood of the album is dark, but is contains enough contrasting lightness to accentuate that darkness. The lighter songs are down-to-earth and homey, and describe love, family, and home in simple and comforting terms. Sweetest Waste of Time and Once in a While are love songs that are satisfied with very little, being content with just brief, fleeting happiness. The House That Never Was reminds us that family trumps material wealth any day.
On the side of darkness, there are frequent references to Hell, the devil, and other elements of Christian mythology, and those images are used to great effect to describe the despondancy and despair that often permiates life. Monkey on a Wire is ominously catchy, and The Devil’s Inside My Head rings especially true to me as a sufferer of mental illness. I enjoy singing along with it at the top of my voice on the highway.
The album opens with the title track, Rattlin’ Bones, which has such intensely hellish and otherworldly imagery that it is almost a nightmare all on its own. When you listen to it, compare it with Your Day Will Come, near the end of the album. The two songs have much in common musically, although the similarities are masked by different vocal melodies. But the lyrical and instrumental themes are almost identical, to the point where I consider them to be versions of the same song - looking at the same subject from different angles.
Throughout the album are exciting instrumentation (guitars, banjos, fiddles) and beautiful vocal harmonies. Kasey Chambers and Shane Nicholson, along with the other musicians they brought together for this album, work very well together. I found out, while checking some facts online, that while I wasn’t paying attention they have produced another collaborative album, Wreck and Ruin. I am committed to not getting any new CDs until I am finished with this review projec, but I am sorely tempted to check this one out. It will have to wait, though. About a hundred more remain.
Next: Still Got Legs
There’s a lot of variability in my music collection. Some of it is popular, some obscure. Some is vouched-for by those with genuine Good Taste, and some is scorned by those very ears. When I describe music as good, it is often with the disclaimer that this is only my opinion, sometimes shared by few. In the case of this album - the collaborative product of Kasey Chambers and Shane Nicholson - I can say with confidence that it is, objectively, one of the best albums I own. Listen to it.
I mean that even if you, as a rule, shun country music. This album is unmistakably country, but old-school country, and from where I stand seems to have more in common with folk rock than a lot of modern country music. It also has a lot of good stuff that transcendes genre distinctions and is just all-around good. Regardless of your preferred genres, listen.
As the title might suggest, the mood of the album is dark, but is contains enough contrasting lightness to accentuate that darkness. The lighter songs are down-to-earth and homey, and describe love, family, and home in simple and comforting terms. Sweetest Waste of Time and Once in a While are love songs that are satisfied with very little, being content with just brief, fleeting happiness. The House That Never Was reminds us that family trumps material wealth any day.
On the side of darkness, there are frequent references to Hell, the devil, and other elements of Christian mythology, and those images are used to great effect to describe the despondancy and despair that often permiates life. Monkey on a Wire is ominously catchy, and The Devil’s Inside My Head rings especially true to me as a sufferer of mental illness. I enjoy singing along with it at the top of my voice on the highway.
The album opens with the title track, Rattlin’ Bones, which has such intensely hellish and otherworldly imagery that it is almost a nightmare all on its own. When you listen to it, compare it with Your Day Will Come, near the end of the album. The two songs have much in common musically, although the similarities are masked by different vocal melodies. But the lyrical and instrumental themes are almost identical, to the point where I consider them to be versions of the same song - looking at the same subject from different angles.
Throughout the album are exciting instrumentation (guitars, banjos, fiddles) and beautiful vocal harmonies. Kasey Chambers and Shane Nicholson, along with the other musicians they brought together for this album, work very well together. I found out, while checking some facts online, that while I wasn’t paying attention they have produced another collaborative album, Wreck and Ruin. I am committed to not getting any new CDs until I am finished with this review projec, but I am sorely tempted to check this one out. It will have to wait, though. About a hundred more remain.
Next: Still Got Legs
Sunday, August 17, 2014
All My CDs, pt 20: Carnival
Carnival - Kasey Chambers
Open up the sky, all gather ‘round
Praise the lord and take a look at what I found
I’ve got a love that’s as big as a raging storm
I got walls coming down that I don’t need no more
I got a sign on the door that says ‘lonely don’t live here anymore’
Carnival is the last Kasey Chambers solo album in my collection, and my personal favorite. It’s also, as far as I can tell, the happiest of her albums, with more songs about contentment and appreciation than about heartbreak and sorrow. Even ostensibly sad songs, such as Surrender or Hard Road, sound more sweet than bitter to me. When I heard the album for the first time, I remember wondering at the shift in mood. One line from the song Dangerous seems to encapsulate the shift in my mind: “We are dangerous no more.” It seems that, one way or another, healing has taken place. If that’s just a projection of my own feelings in reaction to the song, perhaps it means that I have healed somewhat since I first started listening.
Among the happy songs on the album is Sign on the Door, quoted above, which jubilantly celebrates the wonder of newfound love. You Make Me Sing is another good love song, and both follow Chambers’s usual pattern of hyperbolic admiration of the beloved, as well as mixing dark and light imagery. In Light Up a Candle, Chambers sets aside her long standing habit of songs about hopeless devotion, and sings about not being especially passionate one way or another. The narrator in this song is open to love, but not falling for it yet; this is refreshingly, although I rarely feel that way myself.
I Got You Now echoes some of the sentiments in the song Barricades & Brickwalls, which I described as a stalker song, but somehow does not bother me as much. Perhaps because I interpret it as being an expression of consensual, reciprocal sexual feeling, rather than an unwelcome invasion. It’s not an easy line to draw, I know; behavior that would be considered abusive if unwelcome can be a thrilling expression of love if it is consensual. And love, even in the best of times, is not always “wholesome.”
In the tradition of songs like We Didn’t Start the Fire by Billy Joel and It’s The End of the World As We Know It by R.E.M., Nothing At All contains verses full of rapidly-delivered, disjointed imagery alongside a slower, catchier chorus. Like many of Chambers’s earlier songs it has sad words and a happy sound, but in this case the juxtaposition doesn’t seem jarring or unsuited. It may be my favorite track.
Shortly after releasing Carnival, Kasey Chambers collaborated on an album with her then-husband Shane Nicholson. This will be the subject of my next review.
Next: Rattlin’ Bones
Open up the sky, all gather ‘round
Praise the lord and take a look at what I found
I’ve got a love that’s as big as a raging storm
I got walls coming down that I don’t need no more
I got a sign on the door that says ‘lonely don’t live here anymore’
Carnival is the last Kasey Chambers solo album in my collection, and my personal favorite. It’s also, as far as I can tell, the happiest of her albums, with more songs about contentment and appreciation than about heartbreak and sorrow. Even ostensibly sad songs, such as Surrender or Hard Road, sound more sweet than bitter to me. When I heard the album for the first time, I remember wondering at the shift in mood. One line from the song Dangerous seems to encapsulate the shift in my mind: “We are dangerous no more.” It seems that, one way or another, healing has taken place. If that’s just a projection of my own feelings in reaction to the song, perhaps it means that I have healed somewhat since I first started listening.
Among the happy songs on the album is Sign on the Door, quoted above, which jubilantly celebrates the wonder of newfound love. You Make Me Sing is another good love song, and both follow Chambers’s usual pattern of hyperbolic admiration of the beloved, as well as mixing dark and light imagery. In Light Up a Candle, Chambers sets aside her long standing habit of songs about hopeless devotion, and sings about not being especially passionate one way or another. The narrator in this song is open to love, but not falling for it yet; this is refreshingly, although I rarely feel that way myself.
I Got You Now echoes some of the sentiments in the song Barricades & Brickwalls, which I described as a stalker song, but somehow does not bother me as much. Perhaps because I interpret it as being an expression of consensual, reciprocal sexual feeling, rather than an unwelcome invasion. It’s not an easy line to draw, I know; behavior that would be considered abusive if unwelcome can be a thrilling expression of love if it is consensual. And love, even in the best of times, is not always “wholesome.”
In the tradition of songs like We Didn’t Start the Fire by Billy Joel and It’s The End of the World As We Know It by R.E.M., Nothing At All contains verses full of rapidly-delivered, disjointed imagery alongside a slower, catchier chorus. Like many of Chambers’s earlier songs it has sad words and a happy sound, but in this case the juxtaposition doesn’t seem jarring or unsuited. It may be my favorite track.
Shortly after releasing Carnival, Kasey Chambers collaborated on an album with her then-husband Shane Nicholson. This will be the subject of my next review.
Next: Rattlin’ Bones
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
All My CDs, pt 19: Wayward Angel
Wayward Angel - Kasey Chambers
It’s interesting what details the mind will find itself focused on when tasked with comparing two similar things. When I think of what sets this album apart from others by Kasey Chambers, I think about its use of banjo (credited to Rod McCormack in the liner notes). Even though it only appears a few times, and never very centrally, the banjo’s presence does stand out to me.Normally associated in my culture with rustic or even uncivilized elements, here the banjo provides an ethereally beautiful sound for songs with a spiritual mood, in particular the title track, Wayward Angel.
The album opens with Pony, which uses old-west imagery to paint a child’s idyll of what adulthood is like: When I grow up I wanna pony / I’m gonna ride her from dusk ‘til dawn. It goes on to imagine adulthood as a mixture of old west imagery and romanticised gender stereotypes, and aptly captures the simplistic attitude children often have toward their view of the future: that once there are no grown-ups to tell them “no,” they will have what they want.. and then be happy. But Pony is not a blindly idealistic song. There is a darkness in the delivery that seems very self-aware, even sarcastic.
The songs that immediately follow, Hollywood and Stronger, drive a cruel wedge of disillusionment between fantasy and reality. Hollywood wistfully bemoans the discrepency between real life and the movies. This is not Hollywood / There is no camera in my room / This is not Hollywood / Flowers grow before they bloom. And of all the innumerated differences between movie-life and real-life, the biggest is that in movies, all the romances have happy endings: If I was in a movie I would never have let you get away. Stronger goes one further and deconstructs the very expectations set up in Pony. It realizes that even when one is older, wiser, stronger, braver, et cetera... well, things still don’t necessarily work out.
Other songs follow this trend of fantasy and disillusionment, but some are made of unbridled, unrelenting optimism and wonder. Mother describes genuine gratitude, and Like a River and Follow You Home describe equally devoted and admiring love. Paper Aeroplane, the only song in Kasey Chambers’s repertoir (that I can think of) with piano accompaniment, describes in understandably heartbreaking terms the kind of love many of us seek above all: the kind that lasts until and even survives after death.
More than the previous albums, this one seems a mixed bag of themes, styles, and moods. That makes it hard to make a suitable conclusion statement to encompass the whole thing.
Next: Carnival
It’s interesting what details the mind will find itself focused on when tasked with comparing two similar things. When I think of what sets this album apart from others by Kasey Chambers, I think about its use of banjo (credited to Rod McCormack in the liner notes). Even though it only appears a few times, and never very centrally, the banjo’s presence does stand out to me.Normally associated in my culture with rustic or even uncivilized elements, here the banjo provides an ethereally beautiful sound for songs with a spiritual mood, in particular the title track, Wayward Angel.
The album opens with Pony, which uses old-west imagery to paint a child’s idyll of what adulthood is like: When I grow up I wanna pony / I’m gonna ride her from dusk ‘til dawn. It goes on to imagine adulthood as a mixture of old west imagery and romanticised gender stereotypes, and aptly captures the simplistic attitude children often have toward their view of the future: that once there are no grown-ups to tell them “no,” they will have what they want.. and then be happy. But Pony is not a blindly idealistic song. There is a darkness in the delivery that seems very self-aware, even sarcastic.
The songs that immediately follow, Hollywood and Stronger, drive a cruel wedge of disillusionment between fantasy and reality. Hollywood wistfully bemoans the discrepency between real life and the movies. This is not Hollywood / There is no camera in my room / This is not Hollywood / Flowers grow before they bloom. And of all the innumerated differences between movie-life and real-life, the biggest is that in movies, all the romances have happy endings: If I was in a movie I would never have let you get away. Stronger goes one further and deconstructs the very expectations set up in Pony. It realizes that even when one is older, wiser, stronger, braver, et cetera... well, things still don’t necessarily work out.
Other songs follow this trend of fantasy and disillusionment, but some are made of unbridled, unrelenting optimism and wonder. Mother describes genuine gratitude, and Like a River and Follow You Home describe equally devoted and admiring love. Paper Aeroplane, the only song in Kasey Chambers’s repertoir (that I can think of) with piano accompaniment, describes in understandably heartbreaking terms the kind of love many of us seek above all: the kind that lasts until and even survives after death.
More than the previous albums, this one seems a mixed bag of themes, styles, and moods. That makes it hard to make a suitable conclusion statement to encompass the whole thing.
Next: Carnival
Wednesday, August 06, 2014
All My CDs, pt 18: The Captain
The Captain - Kasey Chambers
It may not be obvious to the casual observer, but I’m actually very fond of travel. For a while in my late teens I was actually more at home in a Greyhound bus station than in my own house, taking solo expeditions to visit relatives before I had my driver’s license. Once I was driving, I relished the chance to spend hours on the highway with only some handwritten directions and an unhealthy amount of caffeinated drinks. One of the highlights of my young adulthood involved the post-midnight decision to join two friends on a twenty-four-hour round-trip to Philadelphia in search of specialized materials for a wedding dress.
Nowadays my work schedule and other responsibilities tend to keep me relatively homebound, but the wanderlust is starting to settle in and I’ve been taking daytrips to places like Canton and Ravenna, where dwell folks whose only flaw is that they didn’t have the good sense to live in the Cleveland area.
Without a doubt, the best album I’ve encountered to accompany these days spent in transit is The Captain by Kasey Chambers. There is something about folk rock and country that lends itself especially to long highway drives, but it also helps that The Captain actually contains two songs explicitly about travel (Don’t Talk Back and Mr. Baylis) and two about homesickness (These Pines and Southern Kind of Life). A few others contain more oblique references to travel, such as Last Hard Bible and You Got the Car. Lastly, We’re All Gonna Die Someday wraps up the album with the kind of “life’s short, act recklessly” sentiment that often accompanies youthful journeying. I’m not sure if these common threads qualify The Captain as a concept album, but it’s close enough for me.
Compared to Barricades & Brickwalls, which I reviewed last time, The Captain is much more upbeat, but sad songs are still one of Chambers’s strong suits. This is especially evident in Don’t Go, which I must have cried along with at least once each time I’ve been dumped. You Got the Car sounds like the same narrator after a year’s worth of bitterness has still failed to heal those wounds. Other songs will fool you; Cry Like A Baby sounds like the title of a sad country song but is actually rather optimistic, and describes the persistence of childlike enthusiasm. Like Barricades & Brickwalls, I find this album to be especially useful for cheering an unhappy soul.
It is quite impossible to choose a favorite song on this album, because I love several for very different reasons. With some effort, I have chosen two that you should check out even if you’re not usually into country: Don’t Talk Back, as the best travel song I’ve ever encountered, and We’re All Gonna Die Someday, for anyone who has ever said “YOLO” or “Carpe Diem” or “F it all.”
Next: Wayward Angel
It may not be obvious to the casual observer, but I’m actually very fond of travel. For a while in my late teens I was actually more at home in a Greyhound bus station than in my own house, taking solo expeditions to visit relatives before I had my driver’s license. Once I was driving, I relished the chance to spend hours on the highway with only some handwritten directions and an unhealthy amount of caffeinated drinks. One of the highlights of my young adulthood involved the post-midnight decision to join two friends on a twenty-four-hour round-trip to Philadelphia in search of specialized materials for a wedding dress.
Nowadays my work schedule and other responsibilities tend to keep me relatively homebound, but the wanderlust is starting to settle in and I’ve been taking daytrips to places like Canton and Ravenna, where dwell folks whose only flaw is that they didn’t have the good sense to live in the Cleveland area.
Without a doubt, the best album I’ve encountered to accompany these days spent in transit is The Captain by Kasey Chambers. There is something about folk rock and country that lends itself especially to long highway drives, but it also helps that The Captain actually contains two songs explicitly about travel (Don’t Talk Back and Mr. Baylis) and two about homesickness (These Pines and Southern Kind of Life). A few others contain more oblique references to travel, such as Last Hard Bible and You Got the Car. Lastly, We’re All Gonna Die Someday wraps up the album with the kind of “life’s short, act recklessly” sentiment that often accompanies youthful journeying. I’m not sure if these common threads qualify The Captain as a concept album, but it’s close enough for me.
Compared to Barricades & Brickwalls, which I reviewed last time, The Captain is much more upbeat, but sad songs are still one of Chambers’s strong suits. This is especially evident in Don’t Go, which I must have cried along with at least once each time I’ve been dumped. You Got the Car sounds like the same narrator after a year’s worth of bitterness has still failed to heal those wounds. Other songs will fool you; Cry Like A Baby sounds like the title of a sad country song but is actually rather optimistic, and describes the persistence of childlike enthusiasm. Like Barricades & Brickwalls, I find this album to be especially useful for cheering an unhappy soul.
It is quite impossible to choose a favorite song on this album, because I love several for very different reasons. With some effort, I have chosen two that you should check out even if you’re not usually into country: Don’t Talk Back, as the best travel song I’ve ever encountered, and We’re All Gonna Die Someday, for anyone who has ever said “YOLO” or “Carpe Diem” or “F it all.”
Next: Wayward Angel
Sunday, August 03, 2014
All My CDs, pt 17: Barricades & Brickwalls
Country music? Seriously?
Seriously.
Barricades & Brickwalls - Kasey Chambers
My mother likes listening to NPR like... all the time. She turns it on in several parts of the house so she can wander from room to room, then forgets to turn them all off when leaving home. For this reason I tend not to like NPR; I associate it with irritatedly searching for the neglected radio to turn it off. However, I can’t have avoided overhearing some interesting things on my quest for a little quiet. One day when I was fourteen I found myself listening to an interview with Kasey Chambers, who was promoting her new album, Barricades & Brickwalls.
During the interview they played “Not Pretty Enough”, and I liked it. As a teenager with low self-esteem, it seemed to describe my insecurities exactly: “Am I not pretty enough? / Is my heart too broken? / Do I cry too much? / Am I too outspoken?” Unlike a lot of “self-esteem songs” that show up on the pop charts, it doesn’t attempt to answer these nagging questions or end on a confidence-boosting platitude; it simply bemoans the sense of disappointment and failure that comes from not feeling quite good enough, not quite worthy of love. In a way, that helps. It’s like getting permission to be sad sometimes.
Kasey Chambers’s voice has a plaintive quality that makes it sound like she is literally crying while singing, and that makes her sad songs especially poignant. And this album is filled to the brim with sad songs. A few, such as “A Little Bit Lonesome” and “Still Feeling Blue”, follow a time-honored Country music tradition of sad songs that sound happy, complete with twangy guitar and lilting fiddle accompanying Chambers’s vocals. “On a Bad Day” follows a similar pattern, but the incongruence of moods is made less jarring because it describes a depressed person attempting to banish the blues - and then admitting that sometimes, on a bad day, they simply can’t be gotten rid of. I can definitely identify with that.
But for the Country-averse (which I usually am), don’t be too alarmed; a lot of her songs have fewer of those elements and sound more folk-rocky. “A Million Tears” and “Falling Into You” are two of my favorites; both are slow and mellow with atmospheric guitar accompaniment. “A Million Tears” is, as you might have guessed, a sad song, and the lyrics describe the feeling of having endured so much grief and sorrow that even a moment’s small comfort can mean the world. “Falling Into You” is similar, but is also a love song, describing a love that lessens all that sorrow.
One thing bothers me that did not when I was younger: the first song and title track, Barricades & Brickwalls, is unmistakably a stalker song. It describes a determination to own the object of one's desires even against that person's explicit wishes and efforts to fight back. That makes it a bit harder for me to listen to, especially with consent being such a big source of misunderstanding and conflict in our culture these days. I look forward to a time when such imagery is no longer considered "romantic".
In listening to this album for the past several days to review it, I’ve remembered something I had forgotten. I have suffered from clinical depression of varying degrees of severity for most of my life, which may account for the prevalence of sad music in my collection. But Kasey Chambers seems to have found a quick route to my heart through songs that tap into that depression, and in so doing has succeeded in soothing it in a way that other music has not. If I listen to her music when I am sad, I often become happy. For that I am grateful, and will try to keep that in mind for future days when the weight of emotions seems too heavy to lift.
I’ll be reviewing several more Kasey Chambers albums, and I can’t lie; I’m looking forward to listening to nothing else for the next few weeks.
Next: The Captain
Seriously.
Barricades & Brickwalls - Kasey Chambers
My mother likes listening to NPR like... all the time. She turns it on in several parts of the house so she can wander from room to room, then forgets to turn them all off when leaving home. For this reason I tend not to like NPR; I associate it with irritatedly searching for the neglected radio to turn it off. However, I can’t have avoided overhearing some interesting things on my quest for a little quiet. One day when I was fourteen I found myself listening to an interview with Kasey Chambers, who was promoting her new album, Barricades & Brickwalls.
During the interview they played “Not Pretty Enough”, and I liked it. As a teenager with low self-esteem, it seemed to describe my insecurities exactly: “Am I not pretty enough? / Is my heart too broken? / Do I cry too much? / Am I too outspoken?” Unlike a lot of “self-esteem songs” that show up on the pop charts, it doesn’t attempt to answer these nagging questions or end on a confidence-boosting platitude; it simply bemoans the sense of disappointment and failure that comes from not feeling quite good enough, not quite worthy of love. In a way, that helps. It’s like getting permission to be sad sometimes.
Kasey Chambers’s voice has a plaintive quality that makes it sound like she is literally crying while singing, and that makes her sad songs especially poignant. And this album is filled to the brim with sad songs. A few, such as “A Little Bit Lonesome” and “Still Feeling Blue”, follow a time-honored Country music tradition of sad songs that sound happy, complete with twangy guitar and lilting fiddle accompanying Chambers’s vocals. “On a Bad Day” follows a similar pattern, but the incongruence of moods is made less jarring because it describes a depressed person attempting to banish the blues - and then admitting that sometimes, on a bad day, they simply can’t be gotten rid of. I can definitely identify with that.
But for the Country-averse (which I usually am), don’t be too alarmed; a lot of her songs have fewer of those elements and sound more folk-rocky. “A Million Tears” and “Falling Into You” are two of my favorites; both are slow and mellow with atmospheric guitar accompaniment. “A Million Tears” is, as you might have guessed, a sad song, and the lyrics describe the feeling of having endured so much grief and sorrow that even a moment’s small comfort can mean the world. “Falling Into You” is similar, but is also a love song, describing a love that lessens all that sorrow.
One thing bothers me that did not when I was younger: the first song and title track, Barricades & Brickwalls, is unmistakably a stalker song. It describes a determination to own the object of one's desires even against that person's explicit wishes and efforts to fight back. That makes it a bit harder for me to listen to, especially with consent being such a big source of misunderstanding and conflict in our culture these days. I look forward to a time when such imagery is no longer considered "romantic".
In listening to this album for the past several days to review it, I’ve remembered something I had forgotten. I have suffered from clinical depression of varying degrees of severity for most of my life, which may account for the prevalence of sad music in my collection. But Kasey Chambers seems to have found a quick route to my heart through songs that tap into that depression, and in so doing has succeeded in soothing it in a way that other music has not. If I listen to her music when I am sad, I often become happy. For that I am grateful, and will try to keep that in mind for future days when the weight of emotions seems too heavy to lift.
I’ll be reviewing several more Kasey Chambers albums, and I can’t lie; I’m looking forward to listening to nothing else for the next few weeks.
Next: The Captain
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