Nick Bollinger discusses the solo debut of The National frontman Matt Berninger and the first fresh release in twenty years from the unclassifiable Sun Ra Arkestra, while Tony Stamp investigates the work of experimental musician Daniel Lopatin, known by the alias Oneohtrix Point Never.
Matt Berninger Photo: creative commons
Serpentine Prison by Matt Berninger
When Matt Berninger, singer and frontman of The National, was growing up, the number one album in his house was Stardust, Willie Nelson’s timeless set of standards from the Great American Songbook. A couple of years ago he set out to make a standards album of his own. That’s not what he ended up with.
Serpentine Prison, the debut solo album of Matt Berninger, consists of ten new songs, each written by Berninger in collaboration with one or more of a small bunch of fellow indie songwriters, that includes Walter Martin of The Walkmen and Scott Devendorf from Berninger’s own band The National. And if you focus on the voice, it sounds not unlike The National. Berninger employs his usual close-miked, tuneful croak to deliver the kind of sketches of modern anxiety for which he’s become well-known. But there are also things that distinguish this from any National record, and these soon become evident.
Though the great American songbook went out the window as soon as Berninger started writing new originals, he did enlist the Stardust album’s producer, the legendary Booker T. Jones, an iconic figure since the 60s when his ace session band Booker T & the MGs were backing the likes of Otis Redding as well as producing instrumental classics of their own. A remarkable musician and arranger, Booker’s gift is in creating musical frames that highlight the voice, however unconventional that voice might be. And having worked with both Nelson and Neil Young in the past, he’s no stranger to unconventional voices. Berninger doesn’t have the power of Young, let alone Nelson, as a singer. Still his characterful croak has never been more affecting than it is here, where Jones's settings highlight the wounded soul of songs like these.
For ‘One More Second’ Berninger put himself in the position of Porter Wagoner circa 74, after Dolly Parton has told him she is leaving his television show to go solo. Effectively it’s an answer to Dolly’s ‘I Will Always Love You’, and if it doesn’t scale anything like those emotional heights it’s an audacious and I think successful exercise.
Though usually characterised as an art-damaged indie-rocker, there’s more than a little of the conventional sentimental songsmith in Berninger and that comes to the fore in songs like these; even if a line like ‘the vanishing geometry of fire’ shows he’s not quite finished with the arthouse yet.
When Berninger’s bandmaster Aaron Dessner turned up as a producer on the last Taylor Swift album I concluded that the mainstream was moving closer to the National, but Serpentine Prison shows the National moving closer to the mainstream as well. Anyway, it is a strong solo debut. The two or three best songs are terrific and with Booker T’s spare, sensitive arrangements even the plainer ones come to life.
Members of the Sun Ra Arkestra Photo: Sun Ra Arkestra
Swirling by the Sun Ra Arkestra
During his 79 years on planet Earth, the musician known as Sun Ra produced an almost unfathomable body of work, ranging from bebop and big-band jazz to Afro-futurist space music. Since his death in 1993, his Arkestra - the musical collective he led for nearly five decades, has continued as a repository of his work. Under the leadership of the extraordinary 94-year-old Marshall Allen they have continued to tour and perform. But a new recording is the latest to come out under the Arkestra’s name in twenty years.
If people know nothing else about the man born Herman Blount but who would adopt the name of the Egyptian sun god, it’s usually something to do with space.
Though his early career saw him playing and writing charts for big band pioneer Fletcher Henderson, by the 50s he was leading his own band and telling people he came from Saturn. The melange of Egyptology and science fiction informed not just his music and occasional poems but the ever-more elaborate costumes worn by Sun and his band. It was all colourfully fruity, even if it did sometimes overshadow what an excellent band they were. Though several musicians who played under Sun Ra’s leadership are still on board, saxophonist Marshall Allen is the longest serving member - 94 for god’s sake! - and is responsible for most of these recent reimaginings of Sun’s tunes, though most don’t actually depart much from the original blueprint. Subscribers to the cult of Sun Ra will recognise ‘Rocket Number Nine’, a staple of the Arkestra’s repertoire for many years and, in many ways, emblematic of its enigmatic composer. ‘Angels and Demons At Play’, hasn’t changed in essence since it was first recorded in 1960. An even earlier tune, ‘Sunology’, retains all the warmth and richness of Sun Ra’s original chart.
Sun Ra’s own recorded output was vast and diverse and this new album by his old band, as well as mostly replicating tunes that are already available, focuses on a fairly narrow seam of that music. It’s Sun Ra’s 60s sound - before he discovered electronics - that is mostly replicated here, though there are moments when they do break out the oscillators which just adds to the sense that we’re on a mission into the unknown.
What has sometimes been overlooked amid all the cosmic costumery is the fact that Sun Ra was a virtual encyclopaedia of jazz. Other artists occasionally put this to use. You can hear Sun Ra and the Arkestra swinging behind singer the Phil Alvin on Can Calloway tunes on his wonderful Un-Sung Stories album. But that depth of historical wisdom is acknowledged here too, in an arrangement of a Sun Ra favourite, though he didn’t write it: the old Fletcher Henderson Orchestra tune ‘Queer Notions’.
It’s hardly the first thing I’d recommend to someone looking for an introduction to Sun Ra; there’s a compilation from a few years back, In The Orbit Of Ra, that serves that purpose better. But it is a good reminder that this extraordinary institution still exists. There’s some wonderfully untethered playing on it. And perhaps the most impressive thing about it is that, almost thirty years after his death, it can sound as though Sun Ra is still in the room.
