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(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
Summary.
In Chicago, at the turn of the decade, roots-rock spawned a style that
was Nashville's country music transposed into the small bedrooms of
the disaffected youth in the small towns of the heartland.
Souled American,
formed by singer-songwriters Joe Adducci and Chris Grigoroff,
featuring guitarist Scott Tuma, and inspired by Camper Van Beethoven,
penned one of the most lunatic albums of the era, Fe (1988),
an idiosyncratic stew of country, blues, jazz, reggae and zydeco, delivered
at the lazy, lethargic tempos of the Cowboy Junkies.
The whackiness was replaced by technical dexterity on Flubber (1989),
but the lugubrious letargy of Frozen (1994) and
Notes Campfire (1997), both eroded by lengthy nightmarish tracks
and stripped-down texture-oriented instrumental jamming, reinvented
their sound around Tuma's guitar.
Souled American, formed by bassist
Joe Adducci and guitarist Chris Grigoroff (both singer-songwriters originally
from rural Illinois), were part of an intellectual roots-rock scene that
took hold in Chicago during the 1980s. The group drew inspiration from
the terroristic acts performed on the folk tradition by
Camper Van Beethoven, and applied it to the
country music and the blues of the deep South. They further
detonated the mixture with elements of reggae and cajun, and softened it with
the Cowboy Junkies'
lazy tempos.
The group debuted with an exuberant collection, Fe (Rough Trade, 1988),
that introduced them as a mildly more serious version of the
Holy Modal Rounders.
Part of their repertory consists of horribly deformed covers, but the keepers
are the originals:
soulful ballads like Notes Campfire for drunk yodeling and dirty guitars,
grotesque singalongs like Feel Better,
zany pastiches of vocal harmonies and square dancing like Field & Stream,
Captain Beefheart-ian blues mayhems like
Magic Bullets,
and caricatures of black music such as the instrumental True Swamp Too.
The band colors each tale with oblique chords and odd counterpoint.
The lyrical Goin' Home exploits the pace of a New Orleans marching band
and epic guitar riffs from the book of military songs.
Bittersweet ballads such as Make Me Laugh Make Me Cry are made more
pregnant by
sloppy guitar work-outs worthy of Sonic Youth.
The word "re-inventing" has rarely
Souled American get perhaps a little too normal on their follow-up,
Flubber (Rough Trade, 1989). The displays of whackiness is replaced by
a display of technical dexterity. For example,
the plaintive blues All Good Things features funk-jazz bass; and
Drop In The Basket revolves around a frantically convoluted guitar and
bass duet.
However,
Mar'boro Man, the kind of yarn that a sober Tom Waits could spin,
the slow and acid Zillion,
and the funereal, psychedelic surf music of Marleyphine Hank
(one of their masterpieces) testify to their stylistic sacrilege
and to the melancholy atmospheres designed by
Grigoroff and guitarist Scott Tuma.
The sleepy, limping instrumental True Swamp is the one mad track that
would fit well on the first album.
The instrumental Wildawg is the highlight of the more obscure and
psychedelic
Around The Horn (Rough Trade, 1990), half of which is taken up by
covers.
Sonny (Rough Trade, 1992), their last album, contains almost
only covers, albeit remade according to their demented standards.
The melancholy of these later works would peak with the lugubrious letargy of
Frozen (Moll, 1994) and Notes Campfire (Moll, 1997 -
Catamount Company, 2005)
The former features two seven-minute dirges,
Lucky and Rain Delay, and all nine tracks are originals.
The latter increased the sense that the American wasteland is an
American "wasteland" with lengthy tracks such as
Flat, Waterdown and Deal.
Scott Tuma is also an occasional member of the Boxhead
Ensemble.
Tuma's first solo album, Hard Again (Truckstop, 2001), is like an ambient
remix of Souled American's most distressed songs.
The mostly unaccompanied album
(except for some percussions courtesy of
Dirty 3's
Jim White) features nine instrumental pieces that run the gamut from
brief impressionistic vignettes to lengthy metaphysical brooding, taking
John Fahey as a reference model and adapting him to the post-rock sensibility.
The ten-minute Beautiful Dreamer
is like a Christmas carol played at one tenth of the
speed and deconstructed the way Hendrix deconstructed the national anthem.
A similar operation disfigures
Midway and Hard Again, quiet lullabies that
seem to betray a nostalgic passion for the milieu of small-city fairs and
concerts in the parks.
A more extreme "de-tuning" of a simple melody occurs in the solemn and paced
March.
It's a cubistic art that drains a song of its emotions, but never dissolves
into purely abstract sounds.
Even the unfocused nebulae of
Jim White Drums and
the closing Sermon
still maintain a melodic core, albeit dilated in a cosmic/ambient manner.
Overall, this is a very original album, with a couple of creative peaks
(especially the first and the last tracks).
Scott Tuma's short (36 minute) album,
The River 1 2 3 4 (Truckstop, 2003), contains
four untitled compositions for guitar, harmonica, organ and harmonium (all
played by Tuma himself).
A mournful harmonica a` la Ennio Morricone radiates drones in a depleted
landscape of atonal koto-like guitar tones. The harmonium intones a solemn
hymn. The guitar plays a slow, gentle melody. Very slow.
The second track is a kaleidoscope of
heart-wrenching harmonica wails and hallucinated guitar visions, until,
surprisingly, a lively folk lullaby rises out of nowhere, suddenly pouring
pastoral, bucolic vibes on the listener.
The third piece is half a lengthy meditation for guitar and half a black hole
of harmonium drones. After an exhausting "om" of the organ, the fourth and
final track kets the guitar loose in a noisy and chaotic coda.
Each piece is full of mesmerizing moments, but the drawback is that they
all sound more like collages of ideas than like fully-developed ideas.
This mini-album can't compare with the masterpiece that was Hard Again.
Tuma's
Not For Nobody (Digitalis, 2008) is a vastly inferior album by the
standards of Hard Again and The River 1 2 3 4: twelve domestic
vignettes, the longest six-minute long, notably
Eloper, New Joy and Rakes.
Tuma's
Dandelion (Digitalis, 2010) is a confused work, that sounds like a
collection of leftovers or unfinished ideas, with Free Dirt stealing
the show because of a darker atmosphere. The mini-suite Smallpipes
does not deliver.
The guitarist did better on the cassette Peeper (Bathetic, 2010), that
contains a five-movement suite, Peeper, and the droning industrial
remix Love Songs Loud and Lonely.
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