Album Review # 38 Phosphorescent - Muchacho

Listening to this beautiful, transcendent record so I thought I'd re-post my review from about a year ago. 

'So I lost the place, lost the girl, and lost my mind.'

As we shift into December, the likes of me, trainspotter type boys, start thinking in terms of lists. Album of the year and such-like. I'm not entirely sure what brings this on. I guess it's a way of measuring the time. For me personally I feel it might be connected somehow with Christmas coming up and trying to recover the thrill of how excited I felt when I was really young on Christmas morning. Or else perhaps that a part of me always felt I should have become a music journalist, hence this blog.

Anyway, in terms of this years list, I'm probably going to struggle. Most of the records listed on websites and music magazines, don't do an enormous amount for me. My own favourite album is not listed on any of them, I'll come to that later in December. But this year has shifted me forwards to some extent in that writing this blog on a daily basis has encouraged me to listen to a broader range of music and dragged me somewhere towards the current day leading me to fall very heavily this year for a number of albums from 2013 if not 2014 . Including this one. So I'm going to buck a trend and write about my favourite record of last year. Next year I'll be fifty and promise to endeavour to step in line with everybody else before it's too late and I drift irretrievably towards carpet slippers and Trad Jazz.

This is just a remarkable, yearning, love-lorn, redemptive record. Almost entirely the work of singer-songwriter Matthew Houck who has been putting out records for over ten years now. This is the only one I know right now. I'll probably investigate further but this album in itself is more than enough. It's a mighty statement. 

From the album sleeve onwards. This shows a cowboy hatted Houck tipping his peak and smiling broadly while a similar be-capped girl grins on the bed behind him. There seems to be another woman reclining on the bed between them and both appear to be in a vague state of undress. I immediately assumed it was a motel room though I might be wrong. In any case it effortlessly conveys the mythic sense of drifting, rootless, American experience. A life spent on the road, in rented rooms, bars and stores in a state of unhinged intoxication seeking a life of permanence. The love and reason that will ground you into fixed existence.

It's clear that Houck hasn't quite found that yet, or if he thought he has, he's just lost it again. This is life as viewed from the bottom of the glass and not wholly happily. It's a record inspired and set in motion by a series of traumatic events in his own life Losing his record space in New York City and losing a relationship as a result.

"The last time I was on the road, I thought, 'Just a few more months, and then I’ll go home and tend to everything.' But when I got back, everything was too far gone to fix, so there was fallout. Losing my place [in the Navy Yards] was a big deal. It’s a big space, and over the years I acquired a decent amount of gear. New York is a beast, man, it’s hard to find a place to do music unless you’re going to soundproof it. Relationships are tough when you're on the road, too - my girlfriend would come on some of the tours, but it wasn't easy.  Drugs and booze were involved. So I lost the place, lost the girl, and lost my mind."

Muchacho soundtracks that. It's a document of pain and drift across a landscape that could be nowhere else but America. It makes me think of Gram Parsons, of Johnny Cash, of David Lynch, of Tarantino of Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show of Paris, Texas, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity and the Mythic West. It's rooted in all of that but also is a very modern sounding record. It's spiritual quest.

It sounds a little like Fleet Foxes and Midlake on occasion too. But it outlasts both of those contemporaries because it feels utterly grounded and bloodied in personal experience in a way their records simply aren't for me. Houck seems to be face down in the dirt for much of the record. To illustrate what I'm getting at I could probably do worse than quote second track and probably the album centrepiece Song For Zula.

'Some say love is a burning thing
That it makes a fiery ring
Oh but I know love as a fading thing
Just as fickle as a feather in a stream
See, honey, I saw love,
You see it came to me
It puts its face up to my face so I could see
Yeah then I saw love disfigure me
Into something I am not recognizing

See the cage, it called. I said, come on in
I will not open myself up this way again
Nor lay my face to the soil, nor my teeth to the sand
I will not lay like this for days now upon end
You will not see me fall, nor see me struggle to stand
To be acknowledged by some touch from his gnarled hands
You see the cage it called. I said, come on in
I will not open myself this way again.

You see the moon is bright in that treetop night
I see the shadows that we cast in the cold clean light
I might fear I go and my heart is white
And we race right out on the desert plains all night
So honey I am now, some broken thing
I do not lay in the dark waiting for day here
Now my heart is gold, my feet are right
And I'm racing out on the desert plains all night

So some say love is a burning thing
That it makes a fiery ring
All that I know love as a caging thing
Just a killer come to call from some awful dream
And all you folks, you come to see
You just to stand there in the glass looking at me
But my heart is wild, and my bones are steel
And I could kill you with my bare hands if I was free.'

That's a remarkable level of writing right there. And the record as a whole rarely, if ever dips much below the mark it sets.

The album itself is a generous package. Gatefold sleeve, lyric sheet and various pictures of Houck, in his rhinestone hat, surrounded by adoring, wasted looking and again vaguely undressed young women. There's a seam of intoxicant fuelled bliss running across the record which for me is what keeps it contemporary. This is not a record that could have been made in 1973. But it's informed by the real-ness of those times in a way that much modern music isn't which is why it works so well for me.

'Give me ten long limbs I'll hold

Lazy rolling things of gold

Dress me down in a New York crowd

Lay me down and bawl me out.'

Like another contemporary Kurt Vile, Houck is quite willing to extend his songs to seven or eight minutes if the mood he's wishing to get across justifies it. And on this album it invariably does. I don't notice the passing of time when listening to Muchacho which is a remarkable tribute in itself. The mood is consistently spiritual, an individual on a vast enveloping landscape, seeking redemption, seeking rest.

'I sang 'Roll away the stone'

Set up trembling in my bones

I sat there all alone.

Just cried and cried.'

There's mariachi brass there when required. There's steel pedal. The ghost of Gram haunts the record more than anything else. I can hear him somewhere in virtually every track.  Difficult to live up to, to say the least, but I imagine Gram would have liked the record.

The album is bookended by two pieces entitled Sun Arise! and Sun's Arising, largely acoustic and entirely Houck which seem to say the range of emotions and experience expressed across the album are those of a single day. I suppose this is how we measure or rationalise our lives and make sense of the emotions contained therein. Just another day on the planet. Then we wake up and start again.

So Muchacho is a document of pain, but also I think one of redemption as I guess the only conclusion you can come to and the one I suspect that Houck draws in the end is that this is all we've got. It's a beautiful record, as I say my record of last year if not this and one I'll play for many years to come. It's a keeper! I've barely begun to do it justice and perhaps need to revisit this at a later date again to attempt to do so. If you haven't heard it, endeavour to!