| Steven R. Smith’s
vision is related to the drone but it is not the drone. It is tangentially
related to the song but it is not the song. (On previous records he’s
done covers of songs by the Smiths and Leonard Cohen, an incredibly
perverse thing for an all-instrumentals performer to do, given that
most of the point of the Smiths and the entire point of Leonard Cohen
is the words to which the music has been set: not the tune.) Steven
R Smith sets down some piano and some squeaking squealing guitar and
then some chiming churning guitar and then a little sleepily jangling
guitar besides, and then he throws in a couple of unintrusive percussion
sounds or a violin here or there and lets his songs roll by like waves.
Drone pieces repeat themselves with a view toward producing a trance
or state of heightened awareness; Smith’s songs invoke languor,
invite Lucifer, and laissez-faire with Baudelaire. Proper songs
go somewhere; Smith makes toys that dangle from the needlessly ornate
furnishings of some southern Gothic mansion back among some trees
older than God. Songs that just make use of drones are dilettantes;
the ten songs on Lineaments, which is the title of Smith’s
new one, his strongest record to date, are drones in miniature, Terry
Riley pieces who’ve taken birth in the bodies of two- or three-chord
workouts more concerned with conveying than reflexively expressing.
They are not eagles. They are heavy, tremendous, philosophical, permanently
peripheral crows. They jump from curb to asphalt and their descent
appears, if you’re watching it right, like a spacecraft landing
on the moon: slow, careful approach, full of purpose and weight, quietly
massive, momentous and historical. |