The words crashed through the window while I wrote this song
There’s still glass on the floor
(“Old Faithful”)
Sometimes reality bursts in like this, like a stone thrown against a window. And the splinters remain there to remind us that no, the true consistency of things is not the one we struggle with every day. The first few lines of “Old Faithful” would be enough to tell us everything: these songs are fragments of an intuition, moments that suddenly resonate with something else.
Sam Sodomsky writes about music on Pitchfork (and a few other publications), but he also writes his own songs, under the umbrella of The Bird Calls. Behind him he has a long series of self-produced records, all based on strictly low-fidelity songwriting; then, in 2021, came the signing with the New York label Ruination (the same as Adeline Hotel): since then, “Old Faithful” is the fourth album recorded by Sodomsky in a real studio, and it is also his work most accomplished to date – the ideal starting point for venturing into the folds of his poetics.
And it’s not that life is short
But that everything around us is so vast
It skews the scale
And the best advice we’re given is don’t look down
(“Going Insane”)
Take “Going Insane”, with its arpeggio as fragile as certain pages of Iron & Wine: the drums are barely a quiver, around there is only the caress of a female voice, the glimmer of the keyboards, the suspended verses. Reality is an off-scale vertigo, just like the depths of our hearts. And it’s a bit like finding yourself at home, for those who keep a special place for themselves songwriter Americans of the late 1990s/early 2000s: the shadows of Bill Callahan are cast on the title trackthe rough spirit of Conor Oberst animates “Footprints”, the more thoughtful Mountain Goats peep out between the rough chords of “Daisy Chain”.
Sodomsky, however, is also an iron Springsteenian (who knows how much he will have worn out the grooves of “Nebraska”…) and in “Pleasing Myself” he plays to deconstruct with irony the romantic myth of born to Run: “Break up with your boyfriend and jump into my car/ She said that’s not how I make decisions and I don’t know who you are/ But in all my favorite songs/ We’d already be gone”. For him, tinkering with the classics seems like something spontaneous, from the Dylan quotes more or less hidden between the lines of the songs, up to the one (explicit already in the title) of “Sloop John B” in “Worst Trip”. Thus, the (only apparently) carefree country-folk of “I Haven’t Been This Happy In A Long Time” rewrites the solo Tom Petty in the bittersweet manner of Justin Townes Earle, while the pace of “I Wish That We Could Fall In Love Again” takes on the slightly dusty lightness of a Jeff Tweedy on free release.
Now memories will replay like the chorus of a hit
But we forget about the verses that were leading up to it
And what about side B
And the faces we’ll never see again
(“Pleasing Myself”)
In the thirteen chapters of “Old Faithful”, the brevity of the songs goes hand in hand with the density of the verses, tracing a path that questions time (memory, the years that pass) and faith (trust in others, the need for meaning). Sodomsky says that what struck him during the writing of the album was above all a phrase from the book written by Nick Cave with Seán O’Hagan, “Faith, Hope and Carnage”: “Perhaps the search And religious experience – the desire to believe and the aspiration that there is meaning, the movement towards the ineffable”. A reflection that reverberates directly on the epilogue of “Metronome Song”: “Despite all of my progress I’m still driven by doubt/ But I take comfort in the process/ Of always kinda figuring it out”, sings Sodomsky, still carrying once his acoustic guitar. The breath of destiny is the great metronome, it is up to us to seek agreement with its mysterious rhythm: “Learning to make peace with the unknown / Listen for the distant metronome”.
27/06/2024
