JAYE BARTELL - In A Time Of Trouble A Wild Exultation

It's hard not to think of Jaye Bartell as anything other than an "eternal heir", and a somewhat unlucky one at that: if drawing inspiration from Leonard Cohen or Lou Reed were fashionable today, Jaye would be on everyone's lips. Despite the help of his longtime collaborator Angel Olsen - who has had far better luck, so much so that she now lends her name as a drawing card, appearing insistently as a featuring act on this third album - the Asheville songwriter still struggles a bit to make a name for himself.

Perhaps also because, for an album with such a demanding and meaning-laden title, "In A Time Of Trouble A Wild Exultation" (which seems to echo a song by GYBE) doesn't sound all that urgent from an expressive standpoint - overall, in terms of consistency and sonic pleasantness, it stays in the realm of a "gift for nostalgics".

Mindful of his recent stint opening for Kevin Morby, he orchestrates the onomatopoeic "CawCawCaw", conveying not so much a simmering apathy as the placid observation of a literary mind which, like Adam Driver's character in "Paterson", often seems to take refuge in wordplay, in the purely verbal pleasure of nursery rhyme and allegory ("Army Of One").

Amid all this, the musical side of things gradually becomes secondary: loose-limbed ballads with which Wareham had already thought to distill the Velvet Underground more than 35 years ago now (the title track echoes the textbook "Mercy"), to which Bartell adds a faint twang of a 1950s country trio, thanks to the live recordings; songs that Leonard Cohen could write in his sleep ("If I Am Only For Myself Than What Am I").

Songwriting, then, remains the weak point of this album, and indeed the overall impression is that, for all the beauty and credibility of its style, the comparison with Jaye Bartell's historical reference points crushes it without appeal. The attempt to carve out a personal identity is almost nonexistent, and the Cave-esque affectations of an otherwise good "Swim Colleen" end up nearly deflating the song's dramatic narrative. There's also the presence of an excellent cast of collaborators to be felt (the flamenco arrangement of "Feeling Better Pilgrim"), but this is precisely one of those cases where the promise is worth far more than the reality.

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09/11/2017