Noah Georgeson

Find Shelter

(Plain)

Record Review

In a business that often seems to take more pleasure in labeling musicians than in actually listening to them, one would expect Noah Georgeson to be a music journalist’s dream.  Everything about this bearded fellow screams “freak-folk.”  He produced and performed on Devandra Banhart’s Cripple Crow, subsequently touring as one of the wild-eyed singer’s backing “Hairy Fairies.”  He produced Bert Jansch’s The Black Swan and guested on Vetiver’s To Find Me Gone.  Perhaps most intriguingly for the blogging set, he produced Joanna Newsom’s debut while sharing an apartment with the famed elfin harpist, before she flitted off into Smoggier territory; he wrote the majority of his solo debut Find Shelter in this apartment.

So why has Noah Georgeson received so little press?  Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that his brand of folk isn’t particularly “freaky.”  More a crooner than a warbler, he doesn’t immediately tap into the current penchant for weirdness.  His vocals share more common ground with Richard Hawley than Devandra Banhart, more closely resembling Lee Hazlewood than early Marc Bolan.  His expressive, deft guitar technique owes as much to Spanish classical master Andrés Segovia as any folk legend.  The cinematic, dreamy ambience (enhanced by an orchestra) contrasts with the earthier feel of many folk recordings (which, while sometimes dreamy, are often more accurately termed “druggy.”)  As it happens, this key player in one of the trendiest movements of the moment may actually sound too traditional for the folk scenesters, who seem to be searching for increasingly eccentric luminaries.

That having been said, Find Shelter is probably harder to pin down musically than many other albums in the genre.  The first measures of the orchestral opener “Tied To The Mountains” sound uncannily like the intro to some sort of National Geographic-type documentary on the ancient world (but not in a bad way), its slightly exotic melody surging in a thunder of low drums, then scaling back with restrained strings.  It’s the overture before the curtain rises.  This two-minute slice of grandiosity is replaced by the friendly, loping cowboy rhythm of “Walking On Someone Else’s Name,” although it’s not a strictly Western sound; one doesn’t exactly picture him in a Stetson and bandana.  On occasion, his tenor/baritone ventures uncomfortably close to nasal, musical theater territory (implicitly, in a bad way).  He clearly does this with the laudable artistic goal of creating a dynamic contrast with softer moments, but he would do well to take a cue from his own guitar playing and keep it subtler; he proves he’s capable by periodically achieving this balance. 

The press release mentions listening to his brother playing “Afternoon of a Faun” when he was a child, which may have inspired a few slightly Debussy-flavored moments like the opening of “Priests of Cholera,” as well as the manner in which this song’s melody and others (“Find Shelter”) feel free to ebb and flow, as if guided by a shifting breeze.  Interesting and effective musical flourishes are scattered throughout: the clanging, handclaps and well-placed woodwind in “Build and Work”; a particularly fitting piano arrangement in “Glorious Glory”; the wavering, ghostly instrument that haunts “An Anvil”; and the bells and rattles that pepper “Wooden Empire.”  Guitar-only instrumental “Tied To The Coast” alternately (at times, confusingly, simultaneously) evokes English Renaissance and Latin styles. 

While some may dismiss Find Shelter as quaint or precious on first listen, his lyrics can turn compellingly dark.  After gaining the listener’s sympathy in the first verse of “Hand Me, Please, A City” by pathetically anthropomorphizing places (inquiring “Why are you not home?”), he proceeds to make himself suspect in the second: “When I speak of people/ I speak of them as things/ I put them in their place/ I keep them in collections.”  “An Anvil” explores the dynamics of a disturbingly unequal relationship in which “I’m the cape to your matador/ Or else I’m the Bull/ Either way you’re in charge.”  With its talk of teeth and tongues, it captures the intimacy and claustrophobia of this dysfunctional partnership from which the weaker individual – whose “fins” are no match for the other’s “harpoons for fingers” – seems incapable of breaking free: “And the mood was as black as an anvil/ But I’ve sought the warmth of the balm of your lungs.”

Not everyone will love Find Shelter, but one would think it should warrant equal attention to the work of his fellow artists.  While it’s a shame that Georgeson’s solo career hasn’t capitalized much on the recent interest in “avant-folk,” perhaps it’s fitting that the hype of a trend would elude an album that boasts such a timeless style.