| Now, I can’t say with any authority whether you’d like this album, or whether I’ll still like it as much as I do right now, when I’m still being seized by sporadic fits of sobbing over Calvus, and Rob, and my friend Joel, who went in for surgery this morning. But I have simply got to tell you this much: right now, Bemusement is doing exactly what one-man 4-track singer-songwriter albums always claimed to do: it is establishing a level of intimacy with me, and meeting me right where I live. It sounds like a person doing his damndest to make something beautiful, and succeeding much of the time. Sometimes the singing seems a little willfully precious; sometimes he deliberately mispronounces a word to force it to fit a song’s rhythm, and you all know how much I hate that. But his melodies are lovely, and his lyrics evoke the wonder that we feel at the world when we look at it through fresh, wide-awake eyes, and his whole project is rich with the melancholy that comes from knowing that your sense of wonder is doomed from the very second that you refer directly to it. But he’s holding on: God love him: he’s holding on with both hands, singing about how the stars are shining brightly over Chicago & about “wonders, marvels and miracles” & sprinkling in occasional seventh-chords to offset the one-four-five. And it moves me. |