Pros: Graceful, elegant, literate, heartfelt, and prettily sung.
Cons: The melodies seemed elusive and diffident, until I got used to them.
The Bottom Line: An unexpected folk-pop gem, in which a longtime harmony singer demonstrated everything she'd absorbed about songwriting while sitting in on other people's songs.
voxpoptart's Full Review: Veering From the Wave by Jennifer Kimball
(I apologize for my unplanned break here. There are, by now, a dozen new records and books I'm longing to tell you about, not to mention two mix CD's made for me by Shilmafone. But I write and rate and comment at night, and recently my nights have been wasted either sleeping – I'm still adjusting to how my after-school job now has me teaching math as well as English – or changing water buckets under the many leaks in our ceiling, which was rumored to be fixed this past Wednesday, but leaked again last night.
One of the records I've been loving lately is a rediscovery: Jennifer Kimball's enchanting 1998 folk-pop CD Veering from the Wave. Curious to see what I'd written about it at the time, I found a piece far more interesting than anything I was planning to write about it now. I reprint it here. Meet Voxpoptart, Spring 1999 edition, resident of western Massachusetts.)
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By all rights, this debut by Jennifer Kimball should have been something I picked up a year from now in the $2 bin, played once, didn't like, and put away. By this I mean a couple of things. One, I mean that Jen's previous role in music was as a harmony singer, and nothing else, in a Boston folk band called the Story that I've heard one song by and liked. Veering from the Wave came with the surprised endorsement of one person whose judgment I respect highly, and totally bored another person whose judgment I respect equally. Her voice, from what I could tell, was precise and soft and classically trained (it also turns out to have some Alanis in its lower, huskier edge). The album title is interesting. That's worth $2, all told.
Two, though, is that something has gone wrong on the way from my economics textbooks to my life. In the theories we economics majors are trained to work with (to project the economy with, to make moral judgments with), a purchaser knows in advance what a purchase will be worth. S/he seeks the lowest price, and achieves more "surplus value" the lower that price was. There's a hundred things wrong with this, but the one I'm discussing here is assuming that price doesn't affect enjoyment. I've finally, slowly, realized that of course it does.
That's why, when I went to Boston a couple weeks back, meeting a friend and dealing with bureaucratic idiocies, I surprised myself by visiting only one record store (Disc Diggers, in Somerville, a truly wonderful place) and by spending a mere $27.80. With that sum, you see, I bought nineteen albums, all of which I at least kind of wanted-- granting that the majority came in colorless, ugly Not For Sale promo packages. Then I thought of all the five-for-a-dollar tapes I'd bought there before, and tried to think how many had really been given more than a listen or two.
Hammell On Trial, whose records seem to be (I'm oversimplifying wildly, of course) a snide male equivalent to Ani DiFranco, was a clear success, and 2 Foot Flame, a band whose claim to producing "music" or "songs" might be challenged by many observers, are hypnotic. But there's loads of 20-cent tapes – by Chainsaw Kittens, Travis, Motherhead Bug, the Melvins, OMC, Chris Mars, who knows – that I've listened to once or twice, enjoyed, got more than my money's worth right there, and have ignored since. While albums I shell out real money for can bore me for a while and still get full chance to end up in my annual top ten lists.
Partly this is simply because I have good judgment about what I'm going to like: if I don't think a record might be great, I won't buy it new (given my talent for optimism, this is not the financial discipline it sounds like, but it's something). But there's also a need for anticipation, I think. In placing a full-price order for a CD, I'm mentally writing a story in which it gives me great joy, and so I at least try to defend the story in practice. If an album is part of a cheap busload of albums, and can earn its keep in forty minutes, why should it, or I, exert itself more? There's a dozen more where it came from.
In case you think this is my bizarre quirk, I'll suggest that this is a very similar procedure to how, in a country where 30,000 albums get released every year, and half of them are probably at least competent, both fans and critics manage to contentedly circle around 1% of them for praise and purchase. Any of the other 99% might get a fleeting chance to make an impression, might make a _good_ impression, but the hearer has no stake, no investment, in following it up, in seeing if good might turn to precious.
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So early last month (Feb. '99), I felt embarrassed to have lived two free bus rides from a highly respected Northampton concert site, the Iron Horse, and never been there. So I saw the vaguely familiar name of Jennifer Kimball as a performer and went there, just to go. Two hours later, Ms. Kimball had a story, and I was buying her CD from her, $10 (yes, it's also available through Amazon or Barnes/Noble). It was still a risky purchase. For one thing, much of my fascination with her concert was visual. Kimball has one of those natural storytellers' faces that can switch comfortably among a hundred shades of expression, which made her between-song patter far funnier and wiser than it should have been; I envy that. But during her performances, she'd be focusing on her guitar or her baritone ukelele, and her face would start randomly switching expressions every 2 seconds in total refutation, or dada irrelevance, to the song she sang. Bizarre, and captivating.
Second, her concert was truly solo, and Veering was described to me as a produced folk-pop band album. What I was sure about her songs themselves was that her melodic ideas were ambitious, weird, elliptical, and hard to judge; and that when she surrendered vanity and finally put on her glasses, she immediately played two songs, "Kissing in the Car" and "Veering from the Wave", where the dodginess suddenly seemed patterned, creating rather than evading, and they were songs I wanted to hear over and over and over. I wondered if the other songs would work as well, were she not blind while playing.
First listen to the album confirmed a few basic suspicions: yes, Kimball is willing to go blocks out of her way to avoid a standard chord progression (except on "It's a Long Way Home", whose Peter-Paul-Mary acceptability comes, in context, as a relief and a joy). Yes, she and just a strumstick are enough to sustain a 5:55 song intriguingly ("This is my New Vow"). And no, there was no plan to let her do so in general.
The glistening multiple guitar lines and shimmery keyboards of "Kissing in the Car" and "Veering from the Wave", as recorded, struck me initially (and to a mild extent even now) as a horrible mushy compromise of what I'd heard before. Still, it was clear to me that the psychedelicized harmonies and steel-guitar and New Wave keyboards of "Meet Me at the Twilight" are catchy and inspired, like the non-Western percussion and backward guitar and meter-disrupting synth washes of "Take One Step". So, too, the piano song "The Revelations", leaden in concert, becomes light-footed and magical from both from clunky syncopated drums, and from the simple virtue of being played by a much better pianist than Kimball.
I was still left with twelve songs worth of tunes that dodged every possible chance to be sung along with by the second listen. Not to mention lyrics that, however literate and subtly observed and tolerant of paradox, are nearly all about romantic pairing and more often than not add up to love songs – and for most of my music-listening career I've regarded love songs with the same cheerful, insouciant "Ick, gross" of an 8-year-old subjected to a kissing scene (and it's all too possible that, six months from now, I'll be convinced I was right the first time).
But life, to coin a phrase, is unfair. If CD's are capable of jealousy when their siblings get less punishment and more unearned love than they do, then Veering from the Wave, expensive and laden with pleasantly strange memories, was probably treated to all sorts of sharply painful revenges when my back was turned. One thing I learned, quickly, was that the melodies are logical and systemic, that I _can_ sing along with them, that they have their cathartic payoffs in their own currency. Heck, it takes just one blast of dissonance on "World Without End" to demonstrate that everything else, no matter how intially odd, is _not_ dissonant. "It's a Long Way Home" does not represent a teaser of pop in a set full of modern art, but an implied connection, by friendly juxtaposition, between an E-A-G system of pop that's been around for decades or centuries, and an alternative that could have been around just as long if people only worked a bit harder at it. "Meet Me at the Twilight" is a halfway between the systems, and thus makes sense as the leadoff track.
It doesn't keep this album from being a leap of faith. But for my purposes, the leap was an easy one. Melody and pure singing and quiet drama and thoughtful lyric details almost always appeal to me, at least a little. The desire to reinvent a piece of the world, even a piece as simple as "what do melodies sound like?", is too rare for an "almost always" to apply for sure. But I think I'm for it.
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(Postscript 2003: I've bought far fewer used cd's, and more new ones, since this essay was written, showing that I do pay attention to my own essays, even if I then forget writing them. I have remained open to good love songs. I had forgotten that "Veering" and "Kissing in the Car" were so powerful without the production, and thus I now enjoy them just fine. Apparently I didn't like her cover of Crowded House's "Fall at Your Feet" enough to mention it at the time, but it's gorgeous, and fits neatly among her own songs.
The Story, the band for which Kimball was harmony singer, are _very_ obviously where she learned to write songs, but I like Kimball's version of their style better. She has not made a follow-up. Darn!)
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