Arthur Russell – Love Is Overtaking Me
(Audika, 2008)

Arthur Russell’s music, as experienced via the slow but steady series of reissues produced by Audika, Rough Trade and Souljazz, has come to mean a lot to me, and countless other music fans, in the past few years. I even own an Arthur Russell t-shirt, courtesy of the latter label’s ‘Sounds Of The Universe’ shop. As such, people are sometimes inclined to ask me, so, who is this Arthur Russell guy anyway? And whilst I would dearly love to immediately fill them in on the whole sphere of Arthur Russell-ness, the sheer breadth of the man’s work and the variety of the cultural spheres in which he moved makes that a very difficult question to answer without sitting the questioner down for a brief lecture, accompanied by slides and musical extracts. For, as I’m sure other fans will acknowledge, “oh, he was just this genius cello-playing gay Buddhist avant garde disco producer experimental pop song writing echo-obsessed home recording pioneer musical genius guy” fails to really get the point across.

Thankfully, I can now point questioners in the direction of ‘Wild Combination: A Portrait Of Arthur Russell’, which I went to see at the ICA a couple of weeks ago, and found to be one of the most moving and thoughtfully assembled music documentaries I’ve had the pleasure of watching in recent years;



But anyway, back to the subject in hand, the DVD release of the above film has been scheduled to coincide with Audika’s latest archival release, ‘Love Is Overtaking Me’, a long-awaited collection of Russell’s more unadorned pop, country and folk material. And for those of us who have heard the simpler instrument & voice recordings – near unbearably beautiful fragments of pure expression – that have turned up on previous collections, this one could well carry expectations of being a veritable motherlode of Arthur’s songwriting prowess.

Going in with such expectations, I’m afraid the initial feeling here is, inevitably, disappointment. The majority of the tracks here take the form of straight-up countrified pop, often verging worryingly close to the realms of soporific post-James Taylor ‘70s MOR. Presumably drawn in part from the sessions Arthur recorded with Springsteen/Dylan producer John Hammond, these songs help add yet another odd detour to the narrative of Russell’s career-path, suggesting an interlude in which he might have been actively courting success as a cowboy hat-sporting FM balladeer.

Having said that though, this is still motherfucking *Arthur Russell* recording country-pop songs, so it goes without saying that they still carry a certain wordless emotional weight and unvanquished oddness, and that they also convey a genuine love for the comforting joy and fleeting profundity of an easy-going pop melody. But Arthur’s songwriting chops, whilst nice enough, remain underdeveloped here in view of what came later. Whilst these compositions still convey the essential purity of intent that marks out all of Russell’s music, and a couple of the better tunes (‘Close My Eyes’ and ‘Oh Fernanda Why’ are my picks) make it to within stumbling distance of the sublime, the effortless transcendence of his later work is lacking, dooming most of this collection to lurk closer to the realms of the ‘curious’ than the ‘mindblowing’ in yr music collection.

And curious is the word, as fragments of zen lyricism and sonic exploration can’t help but creep in, sabotaging any dreams of radioplay. ‘Goodbye Old Paint’, a fairly corny number about a dead horse no less, begins with an austere cello and tamboura intro, and things get full-on WEIRD on ‘What’s It Like’, a lengthy track which sees Arthur putting on a gruff hillbilly-tinged accent to recite a mystic spoken word narrative about a priest and his lover finding god amongst the Ohio cornfields, as an airport lounge-worthy backing track that keeps threatening to turn into ‘Wonderful Tonight’ by Eric Clapton plays out in the background. It’s pretty far-out in it’s own sweet way, and although I’m aware that music-should-speak-for-itself blah blah blah, I can’t help but wish I had some sleevenotes and recording details to help me make sense of all this. I probably shouldn’t really be writing this review before I’ve got hold of a proper copy with sleevenotes actually – I'm sure it's full of factual errors and dodgy assumptions, but hey.

Altogether more to my liking on ‘Love Is Overtaking Me’ are the scattered tracks taken from outside of the ‘country’ era. ‘Time Away’ is brilliant - a witty, upbeat Jonathan Richman via Talking Heads art-rock song, perhaps not sung by Arthur but definitely written by him, presumably originating with one the bands Arthur fronted in collaboration with Ernie Brooks of The Modern Lovers. I’d guess that 'Hey! How Does Everybody Know?' and 'Habit Of You', a pair of absolutely sweet, soft-touch new wave pop songs, share a similar lineage. 'Eli,' by contrast, is a brief and oddly harrowing voice & cello piece, it's harsh textures and drone-like construction sitting in stark contract to the gentle fare on the rest of this disc, perhaps highlighting the certain-elusive-something what’s missing from much of this material. And the set closes on a definite highlight with ‘Janine’, a beautiful radio-hit-that-never-was, sounding like the missing link between the earlier new wave songs and the private universe of avant-pop sartori Russell went on to craft on ‘Calling Out Of Context’ and ‘World Of Echo’.... that is, until it cuts out unexpectedly at 1:45, throwing us back down to earth like a rock slung from a motorway overpass, realising how warm and engrossing Arthur Russell’s music can be, how lucky we are to be able to spend time in its company, and how, for all the mysteries and inconsistencies of this particular collection, his songs never fail to make the world feel like a good home for a few minutes.

Mp3s>
Close My Eyes
Janine

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Labels: album reviews, Arthur Russell, country, pop, reissues