With Transfiguration of Vincent, M. Ward is batting .1000. He has three solid albums released in a little over three years. The young Portland, Oregon-based musician just keeps turning out charming, idiosyncratic albums that mark him as an American original.
Ward’s first two CD’s, Duet For Guitars #2 and End of Amnesia, were underground hits in Europe and America, and Vincent continues in the same vein — richly lyrical songs full of musical hooks, sung in a ragged-edged, hushed-falsetto style, in a setting of nimbly fingerpicked guitars, plinking piano, shambling drumbeats and a collection of found sounds, samples and field recordings. It’s a rich musical stew that somehow passes itself off as minimalistic, a sort of post-modern Delta blues, filtered through the likes of Nick Drake, Neil Young and especially primitive guitarist John Fahey.
It’s hard to describe, but easy to listen to.
Thematically, Vincent seems the stuff of depressive shoe-gazers. Even just the song titles sound morbid: “Sad, Sad Song,” “Undertaker,” “Outta My Head,” “Dead Man,” “Poor Boy, Minor Key.” But then, rock ‘n’ roll has always specialized in sad songs that make you want to dance, or at least tap your feet, and that’s especially true of this collection. The second track is about the album’s title character, “Vincent O’Brien,” who “only sings when he’s sad/and he’s sad all the time.” Musically, though, the song features soaring, distorted electric guitars, and a refrain that’s full of McCartney-esque vocal flourishes, rocking harder than just about anything on his previous two albums.
“Sad, Sad Song” is a thumping r&b that finds the narrator asking a succession of characters — the doctor, the whip-poorwill, the whale, and of course, “Mama,” “What do you do when your true love leaves?” over a wash of moaning organ. He gets pretty much the same answer from them all, of course: Sing that sad, sad song, and if it doesn’t bring her back, at least you’ll feel a little better.
Ward is impressive in his use of metaphors and imagery, as in “Undertaker,” where he sings “Love is so good when you’re treated like you should be/The sky goes on forever in a symphony of song … and all you gotta do is find a sword and a stone.” He also uses nice twists like internal rhymes and unexpected juxtapositions of objects and human characteristics, as in “Involuntary.” “When the phone has lost its bell/and the doorbell lost its sound/you’re only hearing your heart pound/it’s involuntary.”
There’s a lovely slow cover of Bowie’s “Let’s Dance,” and elsewhere Ward harks back to Johnny Cash with the Tennessee Two-inspired shuffle of “Helicopter,” and to Taj Mahal with the slide-guitar picking and biblical imagery of “Get to the Table on Time.” The album is bookended with two instrumentals, “Transfiguration #1” and “#2,” the former a jaunty tune on fingerpicked guitar, the latter a bluesy inversion of the tune on solo piano.
Throughout, we hear snippets of crackly radio static, footsteps and closing doors, crickets chirping and train whistles in the distance, tying the tracks together and enhancing the aura of Ward’s hushed, vocals and dreamlike imagery. But even without the electronic enhancements, these songs stand on their own. They’re well-constructed and well-delivered, often whimsically sad but never depressing. Ward’s work is quietly powerful testimony to the potential of one person with a guitar to make effective art.
Transfiguration of Vincent seems small and low-key, but it’s a mighty achievement: a musical work that is an accessible, yet personal and highly idiosyncratic statement. Entertaining, thought-provoking, and just plain fun, Vincent is one of the best albums of 2003.
(Merge, 2003)
