live-blogging the new Vic Chesnutt record!

Happy interregnum! Thought I'd take a moment as we sit here between holidays and presidents to weigh in for a first time on Dark Developments, the newish LP by Vic Chesnutt, Elf Power and the Amorphous Strums. I am so listening to it now. Or, if listening is too active a verb, then you can at least count on the fact that it's on in the background as I write.

This is my second time through, and I like it almost (but not quite) three times as much as I did the first time. And it's not that I was just crankier the first time and feel much better now thank you. The album is now a bit more familiar, and a little bit of familiarity -- at least with music -- can go a long way. With halfway decent music, I do get something of a rush from being able to think, "oh yeah, here's this song that goes like this." And you don't get that the first time through -- even if a piece of music is terribly derivative, I find myself having to discover the specific ways in which it's derivative. I guess what I'm trying to say is that even "Oops, I Did It Again" probably had to grow on me through a listen or two.

I don't think this can be a proper album review, because either you're going to listen to Dark Developments or you're not, and yes, perhaps I could sway your fate a little one way or the other, but I don't think I particularly want to do any convincing. Thus, I don't feel like saying too much about the album itself (not that commenting on the actual musico-lyrical content is any sort of requirement in most album reviews anyway -- I mean what am I going to say? "It sounds like Chrissie Hynde dry-humping a bust of Shostakovich"? Because, fwiw, it doesn't sound much like that.)

I will say that I'm grateful to the good folks at Orange Twin records for getting my mail-ordered copy of the album to me after an apparently unsuccessful first attempt -- I wonder if my mail-lady secretly hearts Vic Chesnutt.

I will also say that I cannot listen to the closing track, "Phil the Fiddler", without inserting "Joe the Plumber" into every stanza. The album came out, to the best of my recollection, just before McCain tried to revive the medieval name-article-occupation formulation. In this weird time of experienced people coughing up "depression" every now and then, this is an album worth reading some portent into. In a way that I haven't quite heard since Dylan's Modern Times, it opens itself up to a little interpretation -- feeling like a message in a bottle from someone stranded in the very near future (like three-days-from-now near). It's obtuse without being particularly obstinate. (I don't know what that sentence means, exactly, and I'll have you know that I wanted to work "oblong" in there somewhere, but it just didn't cut it.)

And I think I will be returning to discuss this album again. What's everyone else hearing these days?