Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad
I wonder, is it the languid pace that draws, or rather, sucks me in, drags me down, to its mournfulness? Is it the bouncing-off-cave-walls background vocals? Perhaps it’s those sizzling maracas. But maybe the answer lies in its unabashed logorrhea, on the verge of “misspelling disaster.” One can only stand in awe, or should I say audacity, before the mouthful of “Tenuous at best was all he had to say when pressed about the rest of it, the world that is from proto-Sanskrit Minoans to porto-centric Lisboans, Greek Cypriots and Hobis-hots, who hang around the ports a lot.” Has this guy been reading John Ashbery? Or Wallace Stevens at his most wonderfully inscrutable? ‘The Comedian As the Letter C,’ for instance. It’s that silver blur, that energetic opacity, but with a slippery tongue-twisting all his own.
John Madera thinks Andrew Bird‘s a Noble Beast.