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The Tall
Grass Captains of Greater Chicago: She Moved Through
Theres an Elephant-6 retro pop going on in this release, but developed and matured with a modern flair, all treble overload and throat-scraped vocals, with AM gold on the periphery adding grit and emotional solidity. Composed as elegy after a string of personal tragedies, songwriter Mark Mattson (Chicagos Klugmaknotts and Luminous in Chicago, and Dekalb Illinois Grenadier, reviewed elsewhere on LOTD) has discovered in his own need to impose musical order a desire to transcend simply sad music, to take that experience of loss and despair and unfairness, and make something about the mystery of it all, about the beauty of being alive. He succeeds. Working with long-term drummer and partner Craig Swafford, Mattson has created an album that perfectly balances their essentially joyful, hyperactive classic-neu sound think a particularly focused Pavement meeting Of Montreal for coffee before the Eels show and you might come close with the sobriety and wisdom of a man who embraces his lost innocence and makes it into strength. The word is celebratory, with eyes wide open, and its an uplifting tonic for the listener with its gorgeous production values and professional, confident sound. From emotional opener Something Else, soft and psychedelic by turns with emotional vocals outrunning the mic, to the funky, driving beats of Her Love Has Time Defied, the album recalls a variety of well-known and decade-spanning party songs (Supersonic and Duncan Sheik, the Hollies and Carpenters), but spins them off into adamant and confident places that The Captains claim for their own. World Exploding could be the mission statement, an elegiac and sometimes harsh lullaby whose existential epiphany perfectly underscores the line this album walks between tragedy and joy, while She Moved Through provides a gentle folk counterpoint, obliquely addressing the tragedies themselves, and celebrating the lives of those lost with a childlike delight. The two songs combined as a centerpiece show off the musical and emotional range that makes She Moved Through such a powerful experience. Til Tulsa, Queen of a Million Blinking Eyes and Way to E provide a cathartic passage away from these painful central conceits, adjacent to and transcendent of the modern Ruggiero/Costello troubadour tropes. Countless Days On recalls Elliott Smiths revisiting of Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel in melody and lo-fi production perhaps a bit too closely, but its a nice way of tying our AM radio childhoods to our XM futures, without avoiding whats left off that dial.
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