I listened to Jim O'Rourke's record from this year Simple Songs for the first time a couple of days ago and thought that this was probably the best new record I've heard this year. I'm listening to it now for a second time now and I'm pretty sure it is.
Not that it sounds like a 'new' album. It very much takes almost all of its cues quite unashamedly from the nineteen seventies. Listening to it you'll hear traces of Harry Nilsson, Van Dyke Parkes, Warren Zevon, Elton John and I'm really delighted to say Cat Stevens, very strongly in the tone and phrasing of O'Rourke's voice.
Meanwhile behind him, his backing band unwind like a set of LA based long-haired bearded mid-seventies studio musicians laying down their tracks between joints. It's all gloriously confident. The cover shot of the record sets the tone. A shot of O'Rourke from the back wearing a mottled green sweater and matching hat, smoking a cigarette, the shot swathed in its rising smoke-rings. It's confidently cool.
O'Rourke has every right to feel fairly sure about what he's doing. He has a CV so credible it's hard to fathom. There's far too much to list, so while I'd refer you to Wikipedia for details it's enough to briefly state that he's spent four years in Sonic Youth, worked with Wilco, Stereolab, Smog, Joanna Newsome and countless others and migrated gradually from Chicago to New York and on to Tokyo where he currently resides. He's much hipper than you and I could ever dream of being.
But what comes across on this album is a sense of humanity rather than arrogance of any kind. It's swathed in wry, warm but at the same time dryly cynical humour. Strangely, that's not a contradiction. Listen to the record. Although meticulously crafted, it maintains a sense of real immediacy and intimacy throughout. Like a conversation with someone you've known for thirty years.It sounds to me like a middle aged record and I'm a middle aged person and related to it immediately. Like it was someone I'd always known. I imagine that my peer group is not the only audience that this will speak to though. It has a song on it called Half Life Crisis another called Friends With Benefits yet another End of the Road. There's a quite resigned, elegiac feel to much of the album. The sense of someone fully settled in his skin and letting what's gone go. Anyway, the final track is called All Your Love so it all turns out all right in the end.
There are moments on the record when I hear brief quotations from moments of real seventies kitsch. There's a couple of seconds snippet of Queen's Don't Stop Me Now, in one track, (although unlike them, O'Rourke is 'having a bad time') while the final song seems about to spiral off into a Roger Moore period Bond theme for a moment. As a decade the seventies seems an absolute age from where we are now but in terms of musical culture at least they kind of put us in the shade. This is the sound of seventies mainstream, a whole ream of culture that was once thought of as horribly uncool. Nowadays, however with musicians like O'Rourke, Bill Callahan and John Grant drawing on it so skillfully and lovingly so much of what once seemed way beyond the pale is being gradually drawn back into the fold. Right to the top of the Albums of the Year rankings. Way above anything that actually resembles a Punk album. Almost like there was no need for Punk in the first place. Which of course there was as O'Rourke would probably be the first to witness.
So there goes Jim O'Rourke. The man in green. He put out a simply wonderful album this year. I'm a stranger to his back catalogue but it seems now that this situation needs to be remedied. Here's a link to another review of Simple Songs more deeply grounded in O'Rourke's back story than I am. For now in terms of something to listen to this is more than enough. Treat yourself this Christmas!
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