Everyone’s favorite Georgia-based paralympian once deadpanned to a Spin interviewer, “Vic Chesnutt is an autodidactically pretentious writer of pseudo-symbolic, text-centered dirge-ballads…singing in a distinctive but ever decreasingly gruff and folksy voice.” That voice, of course, is located somewhere between heaven and hell.
His sixth album, last year’s Chesnutt-Lambchop teamup The Salesman And Bernadette, represented a pinnacle of craftsmanship. Now, with fellow hairy dogs (and Jack Logan pals) Nikki & Kelly Keneipp joining in, St. Vic ditches craft and aims for pure art.
Lyrically, literalism rears evasively; as suggested by his own admission, Chesnutt’s streams of consciousness would make Jim Morrison wince with envy, and sometimes one simply revels in the colorful textures and timbres of his pipes — from a bellow to a sigh, so to speak. At the same time, his astuteness of observation can be staggering, as when he perfectly nails the human condition in “DNA” (“You’re in a battle with your DNA/You’ll wrestle mother nature till the end”), or the way he squints sideways at his own condition in “Sunny Pasture” (decide for yourself if he’s being joyous or sarcastic when, in his best Randy Newman voice, he drawls the line, “I’m a lucky man, I been handed new lease on life”).
Wedded to the Keneipps’ giddily self-effacing music, these words will become your friends for life. The tunes are minimalist, mostly piano and acoustic guitars, although the departures are striking: the dead-on Beach Boys-like harmonies of “Sunny Pasture”, the garagey fuzz-tone electric guitar and galloping bass in “Preponderance”, the restless tabla-and-snare percussion of “You May Not Be Interested”, the creepy clarinet and keyboard motifs in the untitled noir-ambient instrumental that closes the album.
Chesnutt’s on his way to becoming this generation’s Brian Wilson, and it’s to his credit that he always finds the perfect collaborators. You’d be hard-pressed to find an album this year that brims with more innate charm and musicality.