Doveman
(Brassland)
Normally with a record this gorgeous and accomplished I wouldn't spend much or any time talking about the guest musicians; the music is so great that doing so feels like a waste of words. But The Conformist is so good, and Thomas Bartlett's music as Doveman is usually so undervalued, that I'll take pretty much any opportunity to get people interested. So: most of the National serve as Bartlett's backing band for many of the songs here, augmented with Nico Muhly's (Björk, Philip Glass, etc, and a well-regarded composer in his own right) arrangements and a small complement of string and flute players. In addition to the National's Matt Berninger shadowing and shading in Bartlett's tender, shy wisp of a voice on a few songs vocal assistance comes from the Swell Season/the Frames' Glen Hansard, Norah Jones, Martha Wainwright, Beth Orton, and Samamidon's, err, Sam Amidon (not one of the bigger names here, but anyone who heard his 2008 album All Is Well knows he ought to be).
Bartlett has a lot of experience working with other bands, playing keyboards on tour for the National and others, and here he makes full use of his collaborators' talents without ever sounding like anything other than Doveman. But, and this is the real glory of The Conformist and its possibly-tongue-in-cheek title, Doveman has never quite sounded like this before.
Bartlett's last album (barring his excellent, free, reimagining/remake of the Footloose soundtrack, which was dissected in detail by BLURT in August of 2008) was 2007's very good indeed With My Left Hand I Raise the Dead, and there Bartlett made two albums: one of hushed, cryptic, often very moving folk-ish songwriting, and one of precisely crafted, extremely quiet ambient music. And then he shoved them both together into one 75-minute magnum opus, one that served as the peak of Bartlett's almost forebodingly stark muse. The best way to get at the difference between that album is to look at Bartlett and Amidon's song "Castles," which first occurs in the middle of With My Left Hand.... There you first hear it first near the end of an eight-minute untitled, mostly ambient track; a muted guitar figure slowly introducing itself before Bartlett starts whispering the song. Although "Castles" then gets its own track index and starts being played in more forthright fashion, the initial rendition is the biggest gap between a beautiful song and the kind of presentation that would let you actually hear it in all its glory since Low's original version of "Will the Night." There's something glorious about the unadornment and even obscurity of Bartlett's initial presentation of it, but this version of it pales a little compared to how the song is done on The Conformist.
Here "Castles" is given a subtly lush, vivid full band arrangement that like a lot of The Conformist is oddly reminiscent of the quieter moments of old Neil Young records. Bartlett's vocals are much more expressive than they used to be; without ever raising his voice he's become wonderfully expressive, and he sings the chorus in unison with Orton and the National's Aaron Dessner. His exhortation to a loved one to "tear your castles down" feels tenderer and less lonely coming from a group and it transfigures the already good song into something great and rare. The songs on this album are far more direct and (relatively) forcefully expressed than Bartlett's music has been in the past, but if it's now a lot closer to rock music than it was in the past (11 verse-chorus-verse songs, most between three and four minutes) it's still an unusually graceful and gentle variety of it. The opening run alone, with the quiet propulsion of "Breathing Out," the gentle piano and banjo pulse of the lovelorn "The Best Thing" and sumptuous heartbreak of "Memorize," beats out most more well-known recent indie troubadour efforts for emotional impact and sonic richness.
There's pain here, to be sure, but even as almost all genres increasingly succumb to the lure of self-aggrandizing, selfish misery, Bartlett slips in his grief like daggers in the back: "broken together, lonely apart," "and if it's over / I wonder what it's over for," "but I haven't slept alone in years," "stone by stone I build my castles in the sky," "and if they asked / he'd say he never sang for anyone but you." These lines and others are tiny bombs, lurking in the pleasing contours of the songs on The Conformist until you listen closely enough to get just how intense this pretty, pleasing music is. And so ultimately while I hope Norah Jones fans listen to "Aftermath," Swell Season fans" to "Breathing Out" and National fans to "The Best Thing" or "The Cat Awoke," ultimately it's not because these are fine showcases for those talented artists; it's because, as Glen Hansard says, "The Conformist is just fucking beautiful."
Standout Tracks: "Breathing Out," "Aftermath," Tigers" IAN MATHERS
