Reviews
Artist:Chris Eckman Album: Where The Spirit Rests
Label: Glitterhouse
Tracks: 7
Website: http://www.chriseckman.net
Formerly one half of Seattle cult outfit The Walkabouts with Carla Torgerson, this is the now Slovenian-based Eckman's fifth solo album, the shortest track being just under five minutes and all of them lengthy musically and lyrically meandering introspective affairs, delivered in a husky, muted, confessional voice to sparse accompaniment of treated strings, analogue synth drones and ambient guitars. Here and there, there's contributions on pedal steel from Chuck Johnson and Jon Hyde, avant-garde violinist Catherine Graindorge, keyboardist Chris Cacavas and his regular rhythm section of Žiga Golob (upright bass) and Blaž Celarec (drums).
Exploring themes of loss, redemption, disorientation and the search for home, it opens with the aptly wintery feel of 'Early Snow', a metaphor perhaps for the effect of the pandemic that locked things in as he sings how "these times are tough on love/Tough on sex and swagger" and of a "good time for takin' stock". 'This Curving Track', with Johnson on steel, concerns endurance and resilience ("Gonna still my soul till it fears no more"), opening and closing with lines from WH Auden's Walks and referencing 'Pinball Wizard' as it goes in a lyric that speaks to mental unrest and aimlessness ("Gonna wander here/Gonna wander there/Play some half-baked songs at the country fair"), with the track bringing him back to a place of security.
The slow sparse march 'Cabin Fever' again concerns enforced isolation where "some nights/Can be fucked up and long/Just like that Sinatra song/About the wee small hours", the state being as much mental as physical, followed by the seven minute 'Drinking In America' that sketches an image of a world fallen to chaos with drones in the air and abandoned streets, the line about the falconer a nod to Yeats' apocalyptic poem The Second Coming, of the inability to look people in the eye and yet still with a determination to rise above the malaise (The fog stretches forever./But I'm still gonna find you") even if he "can't get my head around it".
Drone introduces the softly spoken, quietly anthemic 'Northern Lights', again a song about being lost in a mental fog (here the literary reference is to TS Eliot's The Waste Land), but underpinned with salvation in the symbolism of the titular light phenomenon and a refusal to abandon hope ("Good friend said 'it's time to quit on love'/I might be grim/But hey, I'm not the reaper").
The strings-coloured, slow waltzing title track is the longest at just over nine minutes, and, as it implies, finds solace in "my courthouse bride", the lyrics verdant with nature imagery and "glints of promise" and of "Springs to come". It ends with 'CFTD', the title an acronym for congenital fibre type disproportion, a genetic muscle disease that serves as a metaphor in the opening where he sings how "Some muscles they should tighten/While others they go slack/Like the stuntmen that we are/We know the rules of fallin' flat" on a song that addresses the healing nature of love and about valuing what you've always taken for granted, fighting to hold on to it and not assume it's graced to you. It ends with "whisper baby in my ear:'calm the fuck down'", quite possibly the most unlikely disarming romantic thing you'll ever hear".
"This year it's been one for the books", he notes with understatement, but this album emerges as a hymn to survival rather than a lament of despair, may the spirit be with you.
Mike Davies
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Where The Spirit Rests
Fatea Showcase Sessions
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