Inspired by the 91st birthday of film music legend Ennio Morricone, William Dart looks at three new releases of atmosphere-soaked music: Patrick Watson’s Wave, Angel Olsen’s All Mirrors, and the wonderful pairing of Gaby Moreno and Van Dyke Parks giving us ¡Spangled!
Gaby Moreno Photo: video still, UMPG Publishing
Ennio Morricone’s main theme for The Good The Bad and the Ugly simply oozes atmosphere, but then what else would do for a Sergio Leone epic? Which is why it’s top-class movie music and just the right birthday tribute for the veteran Italian composer’s 91st birthday, 10 November 2019.
A line-up of recent releases in front of me reveals just how important the setting of a piece of music can be.
Could one imagine the Canadian singer Patrick Watson without the almost cinematic backdrops that he infiltrates around his songs? Songs such as ‘Lighthouse’, which was picked up by director Jalil Lespert for the soundtrack of his 2014 biopic of Yves Saint-Laurent, the iconic French designer and pioneer of prêt-a-porter.
Just two years ago, this song would turn up with orchestral trimmings courtesy of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, very much in line with Watson’s avowed fondness for working with orchestras, describing them as incredible machines of music.
However, it turned out to be no more effective than the original version of the song, with its smudgy piano reverb and a zinger of a climax to colour in the coming of light. Not to mention some mariachi trumpet that might have strayed in from a Morricone score.
Created in the wake of some grim events in his life, Patrick Watson’s new album Wave comes across as a bit of sonic diary of tossed-about emotions and states of mind.
And don’t worry about subdued dynamics, Watson tells us: low volume doesn’t necessarily mean low key.
There are personal issues being worked through on Wave, from the very first track, ‘Dream for Dreaming’. And even though Watson may have started with thoughts of Frank Ocean, it’s John Lennon and his song ‘Isolation’ that provide both a spiritual and harmonic backbone.
John Lennon is not the only inspiration on Patrick Watson’s new album, Wave.
Watson evokes a cinematic ambience from film-maker David Lynch to talk about a track that catches him driving through the Deep South in the middle of the night.
Another number, titled ‘Melody Noir’, seems to pick up where a Leonard Cohen song left off, and Watson also namechecks the late Venezuelan singer Simón Díaz here.
One of the most atmospheric of all the album’s songs, ‘Wild Flower’, was envisaged as an instrumental long before lyrics were added. Watson talks of him and guitarist Joe Grass going crazy with modular synthesizers. When the vocalist enters, it’s Charlotte Loseth, of whom we’ve not heard too much since her debut solo album, Sea Oleena five years ago.
It’s a mysterious bloom of a song, contained within Watson’s cage of fluttering sonic birds.
Five years ago, I got off to a rather bad start with the American singer Angel Olsen, finding a performance of her song ‘Hi-Five’ on David Letterman’s show to be lack-lustre and underwhelming.
Her second album Burn Your Fire for No Witness was doing its promo rounds but, when I saw an unbroadcastable four-letter word imbedded in the first song’s title, the disc was firmly put to the side.
Just as one gingerly checks every so often whether a tooth still is still aching, I went back to the CD for bite-sized tastes and some were more rewarding.
The song ‘Dance Slow Decades’ had more subtle shading than I’d expected and, in terms of songwriting, I was hooked by the insidious slow burn of its opening verse.
It builds up to a chorus in which tears mix with affirmation. Although it’s not quite the chest-beating affirmation that Elton John might deal out in a ballad, I rather liked the manner in which it weighed and measured its pros and cons.
Angel Olsen’s 2016 album, My Woman, didn’t make the impact on me that I’d hoped for. There was much to admire in its raw confrontations, with nothing standing in the way between the performance and the tape hosting it, but I was hoping for some extension of what Jeremy Allen had described as the dreamy cinematic quality of Olsen’s songs. In interview she’d talked to him about often writing them as imaginary mini-screenplays and Allen himself saw some of them as potentially fitting into movies by directors like Jim Jarmusch and the Coen brothers.
For me to get on this wavelength, I’d wait another three years for Olsen’s latest album All Mirrors. It’s a collection in which the songwriter herself uses the term cinematic to describe the sound and the putting together of its opening track, titled ‘Lark’.
We’re in very private territory here, as Olsen lets forth with the recriminations of her first verse, leading into an angry chorus in which strings almost sizzle behind time-keeping percussion, while her voice, for me, slips across that dangerous border to stridency.
There’s not even a whiff of stridency when Gaby Moreno takes the microphone. Her new album, ¡Spangled! with Van Dyke Parks, has been tantalizing me since I previewed one of its tracks last August. ‘The Immigrants’ was not a new song, but written by the Trinidadian David Rudder twenty years ago, occasioned by an attack on a Haitian by some New York police officers.
As revisioned by Moreno and Parks, its dark and once again relevant message registered with chilling irony in Parks’s ebullient, sun-drenched weave of horn, harp, Mariachi brass and strings, guitarrón Mexicano style.
There’s assurance of delights to come in ¡Spangled!’s eye-smacking cover art, the work of veteran Klaus Voormann, the man responsible for so many album covers from The Beatles’ Revolver to classics by John Lennon and Harry Nilsson.
Van Dyke Parks has described the ten tracks of ¡Spangled! as a celebration of the migration of songs across the Americas. His arrangements supply a sumptuous orchestral carriage to take the Guatemalan singer across any musical border in style. He admits it’s a retro romantic affair and, although very serious issues lurk between the lines in our Trumpian times, the album benefits, he tells us, from a superior language. It entertains.
And so it does. There’s plenty of light, colour and positively effervescent rhythms when Van Dyke Parks picks up his pen and baton.
The opening and defining track first appeared back in 1982 on Ry Cooder’s soundtrack for a hard-hitting Tony Richardson movie titled The Border.
The song, ‘Across the Borderline’, written by Cooder with Jim Dickinson and John Hiatt, would a few years later get the full six-minute treatment on the guitarist’s Get Rhythm album, in which he gave the vocals over to Harry Dean Stanton and had Van Dyke Parks’s keyboard winding its way between the accordion of Flaco Jimenez in lilting Tex Mex style.
‘Across the Borderline’ is similarly expansive on ¡Spangled! and even though it’s brighter in tone, perhaps its deep sadness has even been made more so.
There are old friends on board this time around. Cooder himself has a laconic, laid-back guitar solo and songwriter Jackson Browne shares vocal duties.
But it’s the clear warm voice of Gaby Moreno that reigns, set in a magical Van Dyke Parksland, with bobbing woodwind, splashes of percussion, cascading harp and harmonies to swoon to.
Music Details
'Song title' (Composer) – Performers
Album title
(Label)
'The Good, The Bad And The Ugly' (Morricone) – Ennio Morricone
Film Music 1966-1987
(United Artists)
'Lighthouse' (Watson) – Patrick Watson
Adventures In Your Own Backyard
(Secret City)
'Dream for Dreaming' (Watson) – Patrick Watson
Wave
(Domino)
'Wild Flower' (Watson) – Patrick Watson
Wave
(Domino)
'Dance Slow Decades' (Olsen) – Angel Olsen
Burn Your Fire For No Witness
(Jagjaguwar)
'Lark' (Olsen) – Angel Olsen
All Mirrors
(Jagjaguwar)
'The Immigrants' (Rudder) – Gaby Moreno & Van Dyke Parks
¡Spangled!
(Nonesuch)
'Nube gris' (Infante) – Pedro Infante
Por Última Vez (1943 -1957)
(Nonesuch)
'Nube Gris' (Infante) – Gaby Moreno & Van Dyke Parks
¡Spangled!
(Nonesuch)
'Across the Borderline' (Cooder) – Gaby Moreno & Van Dyke Parks
¡Spangled!
(Nonesuch)
