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A Review of Micah P. Hinson and the Gospel of Progress |
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Overcoat Recordings oc26: 2005 When Van Morrison issued Astral Weeks -- his first real solo album -- more than 35 years ago, he was not an unknown quantity. The band Them, for which he sang and composed, had been successful with singles like "Here Comes the Night," "Mystic Eyes" and "Gloria" (which Morrison wrote, though the U.S. hit was the cover version by the Shadows of Knight). Morrison has auspiciously begun his post-Them career with the heartfelt and energetic "Brown-Eyed Girl," still an oldies radio staple. But all of these songs were based in a masterful rhythm and blues style. Astral Weeks was something else entirely, melding jazz and folk flavors with Morrison's R&B tendencies, and powered by longer songs -- "Madame George" neared ten minutes -- which spiraled outward and upward in a repetitive frame apparently designed to induce trance-like feelings in the listener (and perhaps in Morrison himself) and akin -- in structure if not sensation -- to Dylan compositions like "Desolation Row," perhaps with an undergirding of Ray Charles's "What'd I Say" for good measure. Those few listeners who heard Astral Weeks when it was new -- it was not initially popular -- must have wondered where Morrison could go from there. A follow-up in the same style would likely seem derivative or even formulaic, and yet one wouldn't expect a musician who had come close to creating a new template for pop music to simply return to his old ways. Listening to Micah P. Hinson's first release, Micah P. Hinson and the Gospel of Progress, I suspect I feel something like Morrison's early fans must have.
And close your eyes The delicate, dreamy synthesizers which begin the performance join with the first few lines, and Hinson's soft and sympathetic singing, to lull the listener into thinking she is hearing a lovely -- and not at all silly -- lullaby. But then the verse ends with its twist, the reason there's no need to cry: because no one will hear it anyway. The music builds, adding affecting, not entirely cliched strings and a dueting female vocalist in the second run-through of the lyrics, before breaking into full electric fury with a sharp and feedback-laden guitar figure and the third, full-throated singing of the lyrics. The song has no chorus, and the lyrics and tune could be performed completely in about 30 seconds, but Hinson's vocal control and his effective arrangement make of that kernel a three-minute pop masterpiece that is as subversive in its deformation of pop conventions as were the early Cars records, though to entirely different effect.
Lyrics copyright by BMG Music Publishing. |
1996 © 2005 |
Hinson, to be sure, is not a known quantity. Listening to his debut CD, I cannot compare it to his earlier work --this is the early work -- but it is work so distinctive that one feels both that is must inaugurate a significant new career and than it cannot, that Hinson cannot surprise us like this again. A cursory listen will not reveal what is happening on . . . and the Gospel of Progress. One will note Hinson's attractive voice, somewhat husky and battered -- though not nearly as far gone as Tom Wait's or Leonard Cohen's -- and lower than that of most pop singers. The unfussy and even somewhat old-fashioned instrumentation will recall that of other low-fi artists, though it is immediately apparent that Hinson writes better tunes than all but a very few of his peers. These melodies are both immediately likeable and capable even so of growing on the listener -- a difficult trick to pull. Repeated listenings make it clear how oddly constructed these songs are as verbal compositions. Rather than following the verse-chorus-verse pattern we normally hear, Hinson has already mastered, in a number of these songs, something much more basic and unlikely. Like the lyric poet who captures in a quatrain what a less gifted writer needs six pages to express, Hinson offers merely a few lines, repeated with tonal variation and perhaps the altering of a word or two over an increasingly developed musical accompaniment to create the tension ordinarily built with a climaxing verbal line. The lyric of "Close Your Eyes", the opening track, goes as follows --