Song(s) of the Day # 2,622 New Bums

 

Marc Bolan is not someone who you often detect as a clear and evident influence in records put out in 2021. While Bowie is still everywhere, his Glam buddy is hugely neglected by comparison, as if preserved in aspic at his elfin peak back in the early Seventies.

Still his trembling warble is here, all over Last Time I Saw Grace the latest album from American duo New Bums. A duo essentially, made up of Ben Chasny, also of Six Organs of Admittance, and Donovan Quinn of Skygreen Leopards. They clearly come together to make something etheir day jobs don't enable them to. I've listened through to it a couple of times now, and I'm still not quite sure what I think about it, but will do so again now and share my thoughts.

In addition to Marc, Jack White is clearly a presence here. Another, who I'm not entirely sure what I think about. Even now. The songs here are all well structured in their quirky, offbeat way, alternatively folky and bluesy, mysterious and slightly elusive though as of yet they've failed to have a truly visceral impact on me. To move me, which is the essential quality I look for in music.

So while everything is interesting here I don't find things enthralling as of yet. It seems to speak of journeys to places I don't really wish to go to. Last Time I Saw Grace has slightly impenetrable, wistful, surfaces. It's almost deliberately not here. I like records with a sense of otherness but these ones are so artfully disembodied that it's rather hard sometimes to get a handle on them. I always had that relationship with Jack and his records. Even his best ones.

So I'm already feeling that New Bums are not really for me. Not that this isn't a good record. It is, in its way. But it strikes me as one that's looking for a home. Its lyrics say pretty much just this, on several occasions. Its somewhere in between, in transit, like a train that stops for the longest time between stations for no apparent reason.

Perhaps I'm selling Last Time I Saw Grace short but I think I need to let it go and allow it to fend for itself. I was looking for a sense of arrival that it doesn't seem to offer. As always, in cases like this, when my reaction is probably lukewarm at best.  I'll resort to conventional music magazine grading. I'll give it seven.