CLUTCH LAMENTS A FALLEN HERO

In the year of our Lord two thousand nine, we have seen both the inauguration of the first black American President and the 200th birthday of one of the nation’s greatest leaders.

Standing next to these (literally and figuratively) tall historical milestones, the release of an album might seem insignificant. Nevertheless, the drivers of rock, Clutch, released their latest album Strange Cousins from the West, and did not fail to include a tribute, or rather a requiem, to the President who preserved the American union and abolished its institution of slavery.

‘Abraham Lincoln’ marches up on snare, vocalist Neil Fallon’s guttural lament settling in atop a snaky guitar lead. The rhythm track imposes a triplet feel over a steady 4/4, giving it a heavy march…to battle or in a funeral procession? From the opening line of the song the active listener can feel Fallon’s bemoan as he rumbles out the image of the nation’s fallen hero being carried through the streets. The rest of the tune makes equal effort to despise Lincoln’s assassin and company, leaving them un-named “cowards and drunkards.” (although Clutch did name the assassin in a track from their self-titled album).

The overall tone of ‘Abraham Lincoln’ is dark melancholy, and captures the feeling of a war-torn nation upon her beloved leader’s demise. But it is also befitting of his whole administration, as he led the country through the bloodiest and most trying time in its history. It is ironic to imagine Abe’s first moment of respite might have been the night he stepped into Ford’s Theatre, the Civil War over and the nation still intact…

DAN DEACON’S BROMST AND AMERICA

For the first time in ages, as 2008 drew to a close, it seemed that pop music and world politics might just be engaged in a meaningful, hope-inducing symbiosis.  With the election of Obama, the US had enacted one of its perennial spectacular self-reinventions, apparently morphing overnight from the guise of a monomaniacal toddler hell-bent on devouring everything it can fit into its mouth, into the figure of a rational, responsible adult capable of encapsulating all the most noble aspects of humanity, FDR/MLK/Abe Lincoln-style.

This rather magical turn of events was paralleled on the musical front by a rainbow haul of epoch-defining American music, perhaps the finest example of which arrived in the form of the Fleet Foxes’ rarefied, folk-essentialist debut (with offerings from Vampire Weekend, Q-Tip, Department of Eagles, Gang Gang Dance, and TV on the Radio trailing not far behind). Here stood summarized all the humane idealism of America, all its sense of communal strength and longstanding obsession with utopian suggestion embodied in an expansive panorama of dazzling harmonic inventiveness and bullshit-free soulfulness (Motown + Brian Wilson + Joanna Newsom = one sublime time).

But then, for all its distinguished qualities, for all its epochal resonance and melodic-formalist perfection, the Fleet Foxes record is perhaps in the last instance just a tad twee and retrogressive to be an unqualified triumph, a bit too nostalgic to amount to anything more than a timely but fleeting reminder of something lost and in need of salvaging in the short-term, for existence’s sake.

Proof of such shortcomings arrives, by way of contrast, in the form of Dan Deacon’s fourth long player Bromst, a record that shares many of strengths of Fleet Foxes, but adds a requisite helping of futurist momentum into the admixture.