Reviews
Baby Eagle
No Blues
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Add to del.ico.us.Review Date: 2007-11-12
Some records reach you at just the right time. Sometimes it’s just one special song, other times a whole album. Whatever the reason, there’s a certain magic that melds the music with the moment – the things you were doing, the places you were or weren’t, the people you knew or wanted to.
For me, I passed out on the floor of my old Parkdale apartment with a sweating, pounding headache while listening to Circulatory System for the first time. I can’t forget Weezer and Sloan played through tinny walkman speakers in my high school cafeteria, on a spare period. Or, embarrassingly, the entire summer I spent cycling
Steve Lambke (Constantines) opens his solo album No Blues with the words “I’ve not the temper of the times / I’m a shadow in my home / love has gone departing, babe / but love will come return / I won’t shake to no blues” with a cracking, weary, intimately hushed voice over gently strummed guitar. It hits me subtly, yet deep – all the resignation and hope laid bare in every crack of his voice. And it falls into a simple yet soulful solo and in 1:36 sums up the whole world for me: it’s November, Toronto’s getting cold and love is fucked.
So you take a breath, let out a sigh and open another beer. Turn up the heater (which keeps you warm but not the way a smile or a friendly voice ever does) and spend the rest of the night with this record. It was made for listening to alone in bad lighting and maybe a bit of a draft coming in. Lambke colours his album with harmonica, ukulele, and softly broken electric guitar. Most songs feature Lambke alone, plucking notes and breaking his voice over painfully beautiful lyrics. “Census Taker Blues” offers a story of a census taker’s love-at-first-sight. “You come around the corner trailing sunlight/ sunlight caught up in your dress and falling to the porch boards / like the map of the nation we drew in a bare wooden room by morning light” gives us the vision of a sun-bleached simplistic beauty and Lambke finishes by putting words into his vision’s mouth “oh, census taker, ask me my name”.
“Driving Blind” opens with a slow drum rhythm, and ghostly guitar progressions. The opening lyric goes “The light atop the northern shore, white as bones / You said ‘It’s like the gates of St. Peter’” and the tension slowly builds as the track slow-burns into a harmonica solo and Lambke straining his voice over lyrics about driving his lover straight into the darkness.
“Baby Blues” opens with swirling organs and harmonica and Lambke’s voice breaking over the phrase “you got the baby blues”. Look, his voice is not perfect. This album is rough, sometimes his voice strains for notes he can’t reach, and mistakes are made. This is not polished, and it fucking shouldn’t be. To succeed, blues have to be honest, and that involves revealing your flaws and your mistakes, and revelling in them. The chorus for “Baby Blues” says “how strange to love, and ugly / to love unchanged by birth or duty / it’s love that grows in a belly / and I’ve got the baby blues” and Baby Eagle effectively sums up the dichotomy of life – it’s highs and lows and those bittersweet moments where both ends of the spectrum show face equally.
Then “Black Iron Lake” hits with a sick, dirty electric riff with deep bass and Lambke shouting “Ain’t it hard, babe? Ain’t it hard to swim in a lake of black iron?” “No Blues” (the second time this song appears on the album) comes around next, with a fuller arrangement and twice the length of the first track. Julie Doiron (Eric’s Trip, Wooden Stars, Broken Girl, and others), who adds backing vocals on about half of the tracks here, takes lead vocals this time around. The chorus, which appears in the same form on the first track is forever burned into your head the second time, with Julie harmonizing with herself and Steve Lambke joining her for a few rounds. The pathos displayed will stay with you for a long time: “I won’t shake to no blues / I won’t shake to no blues / death may rattle at my chain / but I won’t shake to no blues”.
“Resurrection Blues” closes the album (which runs a manageable and enjoyable 31:13) with hushed vocals and a quiet guitar. The final words you hear are “death is just a whisper of the pigeons in the rafters / and I will wake you in the morning / I will wake you in the morning”. It closes with the same wistful hope it opened with; the same resigned belief that bad things happen, and all you can do is wait until the sun comes up, and try again.
Some records just can’t be listened to if you’re not in the right frame of mind. Or maybe you’re too old to understand, or too young. Sometimes you let a record sit on the shelf in silence and it waits there for years until the right time comes. Then you play it and it’s perfect for once and only in that moment. Before then, it was just a collection of notes and words, some bad some good, but forever after it will be something else. This is one of those records…
Score: 8.7
- Jeff Geady