Vic Chesnutt

North Star Deserter
In his liner notes to Vic Chesnutt's North Star Deserter, Jem Cohen wrote, "I make films, I'm no record producer. But I needed to bring these particular people together in this particular place . . . I thought they might hit it off." Despite his lack of previous experience in the recording studio, Cohen's instincts were right on the money; he teamed Chesnutt with Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and a handful of other notable accompanists (including Fugazi's Guy Picciotto, Bruce Cawdron of Godspeed! You Black Emperor, and Chad Jones and Nadia Moss of Frankie Sparrow) for sessions at Montreal's Hotel2Tango Studios, and the result is a truly extraordinary recording. Chesnutt is a songwriter of singular talents, embracing a homey but keenly intelligent expressionism in his songs that conveys a genuine, often touching humanity, but his collaborators on North Star Deserter have taken his music in a powerful new direction. Rather than simply filling out Chesnutt's melodies, these musicians have crafted soundscapes that often turn these songs into great chaotic symphonies, with Chesnutt's simple but confident acoustic guitar anchoring the whole. Sometimes the accompaniment is simple and subtle, as on "Warm," "Over," and "Rattle," while elsewhere the musicians truly do resemble an orchestra; a small string section adds an air of ominous grandeur to "Glossolalia," a mighty organ brings striking dynamics on "Everything I Say," a mass of harmonies and reverb-soaked guitar meshes gloriously with "You Are Never Alone," washes of sound ebb and flow through the atmospheric "Rustic City Fathers," and the ensemble rises into a glorious fusion of beauty and noise on "Debriefing" and "Marathon." On North Star Deserter, the musicians working with Vic Chesnutt serve as collaborators rather than simple accompanists, and they've truly brought out the best in one another; this is powerful, adventurous music that's as challenging as it is beautiful, and ranks with Chesnutt's finest work to date.

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Ghetto Bells
As suggested by the broad and eccentrically cinematic sweep of his songs, Vic Chesnutt is a songwriter not afraid to think big, and many of his best records have found the tunesmith working with large-scale musical accompaniment, most notably 1998's The Salesman and Bernadette (cut with the Nashville chamber-twang ensemble Lambchop) and 2003's Silver Lake (cut with a full-bodied studio ensemble in the grand 1970s manner). Released in 2005, Ghetto Bells finds Chesnutt working with a much smaller but inarguably stellar combo -- master guitarist Bill Frisell, Van Dyke Parks on keyboards and accordion, percussionist Don Heffington, and Dominic Genova and Tina Chesnutt trading off on bass. There's no denying the skill and intelligence of the players, who lend both strong individual talents and an admirable gift for collaboration to these recordings, but this is also an album that sounds a bit more intimate than it reads. As a lyricist, Chesnutt's poetic vision keeps getting broader and reaching farther with each album, and despite the talents of the musicians here, on several tracks the music simply lacks the physical strength to handle the lyrical weight of Chesnutt's material (though this isn't always the case -- the gloriously wheezy string synthesizer Parks plays on "Virginia" gives the tune an appropriately loopy grandeur, and the skeletal rhythmic framework of "Gnats" suits the material perfectly). None of the players on Ghetto Bells makes a wrong move here, with Frisell in particularly stellar form, but producer John Chelew doesn't give this music a sound as large, ambitious, and full of wonder as Chesnutt reaches for in his songs. Which isn't to say that Ghetto Bells fails -- it has far too many wonderful moments to deserve that appellation, and the glorious interplay between Chesnutt and accompanying vocalist Liz Durrett on "What Do You Mean?" alone justifies its existence. But there's something about Ghetto Bells that suggests we're listening to the pan-and-scan version of a disc that was meant to be heard in glorious CinemaScope. And Chesnutt deserves nothing less.

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Nine High a Pallet
Brute's Nine High a Pallet is the result of two days of jamming between Vic Chesnutt and Widespread Panic, an odd pairing if there ever was one. On paper, Chesnutt's stripped-back, bitter, folky records seem at odds with Widespread Panic's winding, Allman Brothers-inspired Southern rock. However, Brute's record sounds much better than it reads, adding a loose rhythmic kick to Chesnutt's tales.


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