TOGETHER AGAIN: Samuel James + Meantone |
When the Streets put out Original Pirate Material in 2004, there was much agreement that the crazy cadenced rap coming out of that Brit’s mouth was genuinely as original as music gets nowadays, exploring the very edges of contemporary music. Meantone’s Original Graveyard Blues and Samuel James’s Return of Sugar Smallhouse seek originality by going the other direction, in between the cracks of the original American musical form: the blues. From the place where jazz and rock and hip hop germinated, the blues have meandered to our contemporary ears from the beginnings of the 20th century, sometimes showing up on our doorsteps in the ragged clothes of the uninspired beggars of our respect, other times clad in mullets, two-tone shirts, and tired guitar pyrotechnics. And every once in a while conjuring the essence of whatever it was that had people claiming Robert Johnson had, indeed, sold his soul to the devil.
It takes a special interpretation of that 12-bar form, that 1-4-5, to break out beyond the tastes of the blues fan and appeal to a broader audience. Meantone and James certainly put their own spins on it, melding elements as diverse as punk and bluegrass into some very straightforward and classic song forms. Neither overwhelm with orchestration, Meantone employing only his own affectedly low vocals and fretless electric guitar with crazy Medieval 31-note octave tuning and the backing drums of his sidekick Young Brett. James gives you even less to grab onto, just his vocals and slide-inflected resonator guitar other than on one three-minute harmonica solo called “Stomp.”
These guys are characters, above all else, crafting personas as much as crafting songs and sounds.
Meantone makes it clear from the outset that he’s reveling in the idea of bluesman as outlaw, trying his damnedest to be mean even as you can practically hear the smile on his face. As his album begins, “the phone is ringing, pounding on my door/Two hookers and a case of beer, lying on my floor.” There’s little question the two-piece can produce enough sound to fill out the song and rarely has a singer seemed more suited to a repeated phrase than Meantone and “two hookers and a case of beer.” In fact, Meantone is basically Eggbot, Portland’s other two-piece named for its frontman. Where Eggbot throws together pure pop songs long on repeated lyrics, Meantone does the same for the blues, replacing Eggbot’s Farfisa vamp with his own chunking, recycling (and I don’t mean recycled at all) blues riffs. They walk the same line between serious musician and musical comedian, too, like the Dead Milkmen without the mean-spiritedness.
Well, “Screw You” (“and the horse you rode in on”) might be close to the Milkmen’s “I’m real bored, got nothing to do/Think I’ll drive some retards to the zoo” when it comes to participating in normal society.
Where Meantone separate from Eggbot and the Milkmen, however, is with their song length. Many of the tunes on Graveyard Blues sprawl out past four and five minutes. “Kick Your Ass,” “dedicated to all the guys out there hassling all the ladies” and sung through Meantone’s signature gas mask, even gets near 6:30. This is quite simply too long. There’s just not enough going on to warrant that kind of investment in the tune, the lyrics not witty enough (and really, when it comes down to it, just a way for Meantone to talk about how hot his girl is), and while the guitar-playing is impressive in its mix of chords and single notes — a real treat for the headphones, actually — it sounds like it would be more fun to play than listen to.
By the half-way point of Meantone’s album, there’s a desperate need for a ballad, or a real burner, just to mix things up. When the ballad finally comes, a soulful “So Small” that serves as the album’s final song, it might not be too little, but it’s definitely too late.
James mixes things up a bit more, and on the whole gets off better lines, especially what seem to be his signature final words. As “Big Black Ben” finishes, we discover “Sheriff’s wife had a baby, but that baby was not white.” When the sprawling narrative of “Two Tailed Creek Weasel Blues” winds up, our protagonist finally plays his best tune for his wife, but “she smashed me over the head, said ‘What the hell took you so long?’” James inhabits this persona of Sugar Smallhouse with an ironic low-pitched growl, lyrics as much spoken as sung, and largely succeeds in filling out his costume while letting his audience know, like a Bertolt Brecht for the Mississippi Delta, that it is, indeed, all an act.
We get a peek behind the curtain with “The ‘Here Come Nina’ Country-Ragtime Surprise,” which is just that, a pleasant country-ragtime surprise, but is also James laid most bare, like he can’t remember to deliver his affected vocals while playing the tough fingerpicking and so he’s singing in a tenor you won’t hear anywhere else on the album. It’s got some serious charm.
