You know that feeling when sometimes a song gets right into you, beyond that usual stage of just liking it, but to a point where you actually feel you have to listen to it more and more until you understand it and why it effects you so. Those songs don’t come along all that often in my experience, but when they do they really get under my skin. The latest one to do so is off The Boxer, the latest LP from Cincinatti band The National who have been raved about recently on the blogosphere mainly thanks to their support slot with Arcade Fire. On the back of such an honour I bought the album and I must say it has rarely been out of my sight in the days since, fully surpassing the expectations usually attributed to a decent support band, and displaying a talent all of their very own. The song that has really got me, that really seems to be speaking to me, is Slow Show.

It is hauntingly melancholic, formed around the deliberate strumming of an acoustic guitar accentuating the sombre minor chords around which Matt Berlinger half mumbles his words as though this is some sort of confession. It feels deliberately difficult to listen to, something very close and personal, but at the same time you get the impression that he wants you to hear, to understand what he is saying. Then out of the murky verse steps, emphasised by soft backing vocals, the haunting chorus consisting of these words: 

I wanna hurry home to you
put on a slow, dumb show for you
and crack you up
so you can put a blue ribbon on my brain
god I’m very, very frightened
I’ll overdo it

It’s soul-breaking stuff with the simple drumming and elegantly minimalist instrumentation. It also shows a side of musicians that seems to be rarely seen these days, one of humility. He is owning up to the fact that he has brought about this situation, particularly when he sings something like:

I made a mistake in my life today
everything I love gets lost in drawers

But that isn’t really what makes this song step out and connect so much, though it is important. No, it’s the coda, which ushers in a simple repeated piano phrase which leads into the simple closing lines:

You know I dreamed about you
for twenty-nine years before I saw you

Which, in an agonisingly tender way, seems to say everything he wants to say in so very few words. It’s almost joyful in that moment when he shows how much of an impact that person as had on his life. It’s a different way of saying you don’t remember life before you met someone, and understanding that is very much a part of why I find this song so incredible and so poignant.

Here is a really nice live version performed for Spinner’s Interface with the piano refrain at the end transferred to the guitar.

Thanks to Lucas Jensen at Team Clermont I was recently sent the latest album by Ray’s Vast Basement, a Northern California collective based around the singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist talents of Jon Benson.

Originally written as the soundtrack for a production of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men which ran for 16 weeks at the Actors Theatre of San Francisco this was subsequently expanded to embrace further Steinbeck novels until it became the band’s third album, Starvation Under Orange Trees due for release on the 3rd July. With connections to archaeology and a band mythology that revolves around a 100 million year old cave, it is only fitting that this music is steeped in history, built up strata by strata into a convincing and complete musical work. Evolving over a period of several months after the show closed, with a changing band and a studio rebuilt after suffering from floods, this album marks the culmination of a journey as interesting and eclectic as any taken by a Steinbeck character.

Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don’t belong no place….With us it ain’t like that. We got a future. We got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us.

- Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck (1937)

Through his work on Starvation Under Orange Trees, Jon Benson, the visionary behind Ray’s Vast Basement, has given voice to many of the struggling characters that so convincingly inhabited the world that Steinbeck created. With the background of depression era California Steinbeck drew attention to the little guys, the people who were hit hardest by the hardships of that period, and who had the smallest voices. The title also alludes to both Steinbeck and the hardships of life during the depression. In the words of Benson himself:

‘Starvation Under The Orange Trees’ is the name of an obscure Steinbeck essay. Printed in the Monterey Trader, rumor has it that Steinbeck was asked by Time magazine to write about the work camps in California during the depression. The manuscript submitted to Time was rejected. The opressive work camps in California were unpalatable to American readers, which I’m told, this was the beginning of The Grapes of Wrath.

The music Benson, along with his collaborators (including The Decemberist’s Nate Query), has concoted seems to fit beautifully with this feeling, putting a modern twist on the histrionics. The album is alive with instruments, building an organic foundation upon which Benson’s breathy vocals can weave their tales. It’s offbeat and engaging stuff that experiments with folk and americana and jazz, one minute straight forward, but the next going off at a surprising tangent that keeps the music fresh. It’s the kind of bizarre yet vibrant offering that any fan of earlier Bright Eyes records might recognise.

It’s also a record of great warmth and involvement. It is soothing and understated in its own way, despite the gloom of the times it seeks to reconstruct. Everything about it says it is the vision of an individual realised through a close, family-like group of people recording with slightly dusty home equipment that rattles and hums with the soul of analogue. More than this it also has its moments of pop, with melodies that you’ll find yourself humming along to, imagining that you are walking alongside the Sacramento River, a pack over your shoulder, and a long walk ahead.

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