It climaxes with Fastest Horse in Town, a psychedelicised take on old-fashioned, pre-Nevermind grunge: dense, corrosive guitars howling and arcing around Simpson’s voice, the latter rendered incomprehensible with reverb and electronic effects. In contrast to the complexity of A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, they offer beautifully simple, direct melodies and indelible riffs buoyed by the needles-in-the-red intensity of the production and by the way Simpson’s frequently down-home lyrics – “Tell ’em to carve my name on that bar stool, baby, / I’m gonna be here a while” – rub against the wilfully synthetic but visceral nature of the sound. Every track, from the agitated faux-rockabilly of Last Man Standing to the fabulous combination of distinctly Bolan-esque boogie and world-weary tune offered up on Make Art Not Friends, to All Said and Done, a wracked ballad that crackles and hisses with distortion, is an object lesson in musical economy. They just crash into the next track as if someone’s frantically switching channels on a TV, or suddenly fade out, replaced by bursts of feedback and electronic noise or burbling synthesiser arpeggios.īefore that happens, the songs have already done enough to get their hooks in you. Without it, the album’s structure becomes thrillingly inexplicable and unpredictable: its songs frequently don’t end, or at least reach any kind of identifiable conclusion. Without wishing to cause despair to whoever ponied up the film’s $1.2m, Sound & Fury is better heard stripped of its visual accompaniment. Sing Along, like the rest of Sound & Fury, is awesome: powerful, fierce, irresistible.Īpparently recorded while films by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa played silently in the studio, the album is the soundtrack to its own film, an anime loosely based on Kurosawa’s samurai epic Yojimbo. Whatever the reason, he’s not kidding, as evidenced by single Sing Along: a wall of crunching glam guitars and fizzing analogue synths, underpinned by a frantic four-to-the-floor disco beat, with a vague hint of the drum machine-driven fuzz found on ZZ Top’s Eliminator stirred into the mix.Īnd if Simpson is as discomfited by success and critical praise as Mercury in Retrograde suggests – journalists and people asking what his songs mean seem to rank only slightly higher in his estimation than hypocrites building brands – then unfortunately, he’s going to have to suck it up for a little while longer. Given Simpson’s previously noted unbiddable nature – and indeed Sound & Fury’s preponderance of lyrics that wrestle unhappily with the fame occasioned by A Sailor’s Guide to Earth’s success and with the machinations of the music industry, or as Mercury in Retrograde puts it, “hypocrites building brands” – you do wonder if announcing that his new album is influenced by a foppish glam idol who made virtually no commercial impact in the US and an androgynous British synthpop revivalist doesn’t come with a gleeful side-order of screw-you to the country establishment. Notice has clearly been served that whatever you think the 41-year-old Simpson is, that’s what he’s not, but even so, Sound & Fury is a bold and dramatic left turn: a self-styled “sleazy synth-rock dance record”, that Simpson has claimed is inspired not merely by T Rex, but, of all people, La Roux. Cementing his reputation as something of a refusenik, Simpson threatened that if he won, he would simply hand the award to Beyoncé and walk out. It won best country album at the Grammys, and was nominated for album of the year outright. He also shared that he was in the studio recording a new bluegrass album.2016’s A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, meanwhile, was a heavily orchestrated concept album that bore the influence of 60s southern soul and featured a cover of Nirvana’s In Bloom, recast as a small-hours ballad, heavy on the weeping pedal-steel. The Sound & Fury album found Simpson diving headlong into hard rock, electro-boogie, and experimental blues in songs like “Fastest Horse in Town,” “Sing Along,” and “Best Clockmaker on Mars.” Each song received its own vignette in the Netflix anime film.Įarlier this summer, the Kentucky songwriter played a bluegrass livestream concert at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium to raise money for MusiCares Covid-19 Relief, Equity Alliance Nashville Tornado Relief, and the Special Forces Foundation. The project features the artwork of Rufus Dayglo, Deathburger, Rosi Kampe, Vasilis Lolos, and Takashi Okazaki. The novel comes in two formats, both 144 pages: a standard paperback version and a deluxe, oversize hardcover edition in a slipcase. In November, Simpson and Z2 Comics will probe the driver’s origin in Sound & Fury: The Graphic Novel, a prequel to the storyline of the film. Colorful, intense, and wildly violent, the movie focused on a shadowy muscle-car driver and his bloody mission of vengeance. When Sturgill Simpson released the album Sound & Fury in 2019, it arrived with a companion anime film on Netflix.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |