William Dart tells us why he's fallen for the soul-searching songs of Michael Chapman and M C Taylor and the cute and occasionally cutting slices of life from Amy O.
Amy O Photo: artist website
M C Taylor is laying out some carefully measured terms of surrender in the title track on the latest album from his band, Hiss Golden Messenger.
The song is a firm-minded ballad of affirmation from a man coming to terms with the recent death of his father and the realization that the nomadic existence of a musician on the road doesn’t always fit with fatherhood.
At the core of that very particular sound surrounding MC Taylor at the end of 'Terms of Surrender' is a dissonant twang or, to play Edward Albee wordgames, twanging dissonance that creates and sustains its own sparks – a sound that, in its way, clusters and re-clusters, ever on the bloom.
Taylor’s guests on this outing are a crucial part of all this, especially Aaron Dessner of The National with his piano and guitar.
Another helpmate is Jenny Lewis who sings at Taylor’s side, here floating over the tantalizing tangle of the song 'Whip'.
A number like 'Whip' functions in the album as a sort of ballast, Taylor toying with the almost mystical — ever in pursuit of elusive spirits over water.
When the crunch of reality comes, it does so with an almost primal connection of blood and affection, binding the characters link by link and yard by yard.
There’s a resolution here that, earlier in the album, might not have seemed possible, with the singer fessing up from the start that he’s desperately in need of a teacher.
That phrase of Taylor’s — “Beauty in the broken American moment” — lingers. It also takes me back a couple of years to when he turned reviewer to comment on an album by fellow songwriter Ryan Adams titled Prisoner.
What comes forth in his assessment is a particularly discursive piece of wordsmithery which, as often happens, says as much about its writer as its subject.
Early on in the review, Taylor asks himself whether he himself started writing songs to defy time, to stand with his back to the clock; to order his world in an arrangement of his own choosing.
This all eventually coalesces in the eminently quotable image of Art as a bulwark against time’s dispassionate ticking – an observation that takes a political edge when Taylor observes that Republicans probably don’t have much interest in beautiful art which, ironically, is the one thing that could save them.
Taylor’s songs not only reach out to listeners but provide the singer with his own catharsis and, to an extent, guide to getting through life. This is caught best of all in a song titled 'Old Enough to Wonder Why', its vocals suspended on what sounds like one bewitched harmony. But set in a typical Taylor shrubbery of flickering, sparkling sonics.
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Connections are sometimes tenuous, mysterious things, but for the last few weeks Hiss Golden Messenger’s new album has been sitting very happily in my life alongside Michael Chapman’s latest. But there are points of difference — most noticeably Chapman being 78 to what I presume is Taylor’s 30 or 40 something.
Chapman first made his mark in the very early days of the Harvest label, shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Deep Purple, the ELO and Shirley and Dolly Collins. Working within a generation of invigorating British guitarists including John Martyn and Davy Graham, Chapman always maintained his individuality, straddling folk, blues, and even ragtime which the American Stefan Grossman was infiltrating into the British scene at the time.
And when, back in 1970, this song was loaded with the lush string arrangements of Paul Buckmaster, it all seemed very much locked into the musical zeitgeist of the time.
Over more recent years I’ve been enjoying Michael Chapman’s regular solo guitar releases, but his latest, titled True North, has him not only with a band, but with one of star status, featuring B J Cole on pedal steel and Bridget St John on backing vocals.
And there’s even some humour being dispensed, as they head off, waltzing down country roads for the song 'Full Bottle, Empty Heart'.
Leaking one of his new album’s songs to the Billboard website, Michael Chapman described it as being about regret, but not about any specific person, apart from him. After all, he asserted, regret is a universal feeling, and true enough, it does crop up in more than one song on the album.
'Youth is Wasted on the Young' is just one instance, with a title borrowed from Oscar Wilde or George Bernard Shaw depending on who you consider first quipped the epigram. On the musical side, unmistakably, is a nod to Bob Dylan. What makes it special for me though, is the silvery slip and slide of B J Cole, at one point nicely shadowed by Sarah Smout’s mournful cello.
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After the extremely serious — and very male — worlds of Michael Chapman and M C Taylor, let’s lighten up with the irrepressible Amy O.
Elastic, the 2017 album from Amy O, was a coming of age, an escape for the young American from her bedroom studio, in which she had already given birth to a decade’s worth of lo-fi releases.
While its main single, 'Lavender Night' might have had her flexing musical muscles with a rock and roll band in the woods (do check out the video), it was the airily bizarre 'David' that caught my ear at the time.
And it’s happened again, with the very opening track of her new album, Shell.
The 11 songs of Amy O’s Shell are breezily delectable, each like a lighting stopover on a series of enchanted holiday spots that standard tourist guides haven’t and never will discover. The song 'Rest Area' reveals just one of them.
Amy O’s little journeys are unpredictable in their comings and goings which is their charm and, more than often, you’ll encounter a dark side looming within their verses.
Her musical intrigues are invariably ingenious, whether negotiating the stream-of-consciousness effusion of 'Loose Cassette' or coping with an explosion of runaway chords in the choruses of 'Planet Blue'.
But nothing comes by accident. Those harmonies on the loose, just as surely as M C Taylor’s terms of surrender, bring us back to earth to the realities of back yards and big beds of dreams after the stars of love fell out of alignment.
Music Details
'Song title' (Composer) – Performers
Album title
(Label)
'Terms Of Surrender' (Taylor, Kaufman) – Hiss Golden Messenger
Terms Of Surrender
(Merge)
'Whip' (Taylor) – Hiss Golden Messenger
Terms Of Surrender
(Merge)
'I Need A Teacher' (Taylor) – Hiss Golden Messenger
Terms Of Surrender
(Merge)
'Old Enough To Wonder Why (East Side–West Side)' (Taylor) – Hiss Golden Messenger
Terms Of Surrender
(Merge)
'March Rain' (Chapman) – Michael Chapman
Fully Qualified Survivor
(Harvest)
'Full Bottle, Empty Heart' (Chapman) – Michael Chapman
True North
(Paradise of Bachelors)
'Youth Is Wasted On The Young' (Chapman) – Michael Chapman
True North
(Paradise of Bachelors)
'David' (Oelsner) – Amy O
Elastic
(Winspear)
'Shell' (Oelsner) – Amy O
Shell
(Winspear)
'Rest Stop' (Oelsner) – Amy O
Shell
(Winspear)
'Planet Blue' (Oelsner) – Amy O
Shell
(Winspear)
