A crude art historian might suggest that creative forms develop along a similar arc: They begin as rudimentary attempts to reproduce a natural account of life, but mature into complex, subjective re-creations of the artist’s worldview.
So the earliest, simple storytelling paved the way for the formal daring of, say, James Joyce. Landscape and portraits were supplanted by Picasso’s Cubist innovations. The novelty of vaudeville acts preserved via kinescope gave way to the dialectic montage of Sergei Eisenstein, the geometric choreography of Busby Berkeley and the deconstructions of Jean-Luc Godard. With music, the Beatles’ earliest recordings were mere attempts to re-create their live performances, but their experimentation and development is viewed by some as climaxing with the baroque Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
OK, there’s some flaws to this line of thinking. It suggests that Dr. Dre’s work is, by virtue of its superficial sophistication, inherently superior to the Carter Family’s catalogue. The theory also can’t account for the career of Jay Farrar and his second solo album, Terroir Blues. Instead of following that progressive model, Farrar’s latest work seems to be going in both directions simultaneously — toward something at once simpler and more complex, rawer and more sophisticated.
The 23 songs and snippets crammed into the album’s 58 minutes and 43 seconds represent a retreat from even the rudimentary roots-rock sound of Farrar’s work with Son Volt; Trace, Straightaways and Wide Swing Tremolo are epic by comparison. With Terroir Blues, the instrumentation is mostly spartan: acoustic guitars, astutely applied piano, undulating percussion. But the cumulative effect of Farrar’s songs and the record’s offbeat arrangements is weirder and more innovative than anything he has dared previously.
While Farrar dabbled with dance-tinged beats and denser instrumental settings on 2001’s Sebastopol and its companion Thirdshiftgrottoslack EP, Terroir Blues sees him moving in increasingly abstract, austere directions. “Fool King’s Crown” stumbles along a sluggish central slide-guitar figure, with Farrar’s vocal double-dipped in echo and shoved to the back of the mix. The whole affair shudders to abrupt stops for heavily treated six-note piano motifs, before lurching unsteadily onward.
On “Cahokian”, Farrar’s guitar plays hide-and-seek with a sonorous, unsettling string section while the lyric ponders the remnants of a native settlement near Collinsville, Illinois. “Ceremonial mounds in the back yards and towns/That’s the way it turned out/A culture on the run/Vanished in the sun.” It’s clear, if not from the lyrics, then from the morose, otherworldly presentation of the song, that Farrar isn’t merely mourning the loss of an ancient civilization; he’s fretting that it’s a harbinger for our own society.
The downbeat theme and minimalist musical presentation weaves throughout Terroir Blues. The landscape of “Dent County” is vividly drawn with nothing more than piano, steel guitar and Farrar’s hushed delivery of an indelible melody that’s his prettiest since “Tear-Stained Eye”. “California”, a plainspoken Golden State travelogue, is the most conventional song on the album, resolving itself in a disarmingly artless chorus that reads like a tourism brochure blurb but sounds divine: “It’s been said before but it’s worth repeating/No one could dream a place like California.”
The mixture of high-lonesome steel and reggae rhythms in “Hanging On To You” would be strange enough, but Farrar has offered up two versions here: a meeker take with piano and droning, sustained chords, and a more muscular consideration that lifts the chorus skyward. In fact, Farrar further attempts the multi-take approach with reworked versions of “No Rolling Back”, “Heart On The Ground” and “Hard Is The Fall” (the second-takes all clustered toward the end of the album). It’s as if Farrar wanted to include his own bonus outtakes now, rather than wait for a reissue ten years hence.
But each variation is an engaging study in the art of record-making, and in the myriad judgments that are built into the process. The album is also salted with six roman-numeralized instrumental snippets of varying interest — backward guitar atmospherics on “II”, heavily-treated raga-like drones on “VI” — possibly a holdover from his recent score to the movie The Slaughter Rule.
With its employment of primary musical colors and its underlying feel of fearless, fully realized creative impulses, Terroir Blues is redolent of Neil Young’s early masterpieces After The Gold Rush and Harvest. But building outtakes and wordless interludes into your album isn’t exactly the kind of thing encouraged by most record companies. So credit Farrar’s creative daring to his decision to release Terroir Blues via his own new Act/Resist imprint (distributed by Artemis).
On first blush, it appears self-releasing the album has given Farrar the latitude to try his fancy, heedless of what might pass for common sense at a label. At the same time, he has avoided the kind of corporate melodrama endured by his former Uncle Tupelo bandmate Jeff Tweedy, when Wilco stepped outside convention on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
The unsettling feel and counterintuitive presentation embedded in Farrar’s work here is reflected in the album’s title, too. Terroir translates roughly from French as “soil,” but also as an agricultural, rural region. That might be a clue to the album’s rustic feel, but it’s also just as likely that the title was chosen for the way it sounds. It is pronounced “terr-WAR,” and the post-September 11 implications should be plain.
It’s an especially appropriate handle for Farrar’s work, because Terroir Blues, with its allusions to the modern world’s malaise and its experimentation with primitive textures, makes it a work that is both timely and timeless.
