Many tens of years from now, when I'm finally buried at sea, my Styrofoam tombstone will drift forever, stirred only by the occasional tidal swell or passing whale. The epitaph will read, "Everything was just too damn 'quaint'." Even now, with Bed, Bath, & Beyonds, Pier One Imports, and Martha Stewart boxing up quaintness and delivering it our doorsteps, only Wal-Mart stands as a bulwark, a final line of cheap, tacky crap to hold back the flood. Of course, it's not enough, and soon we'll all be drowning in a raging torrent of only marginally less tacky, cloyingly "charming" crap, and every last handcrafted, authenticity-guaranteed, cried-on-by-an-Amish-kid nugget will have a country-fresh scent. Right now, acoustic folk music is a disturbing mirror of our culture's commodification of all things endearing. Everyone has a tuneful, sappy song to sing.
Jon DeRosa, the musical psychologist-cum-supervillain behind the lush, atmospheric recordings of Aarktica, has repeatedly shown a remarkable ability for walking a very fine line: his work as Aarktica is inviting without becoming pandering, warm without becoming stifling, and at times, he has even manages the difficult trick of making his ambient electronic compositions seem both distant and intimate all at once. Seemingly genuine emotion is the key to his successes in that icy genre, and more than anything else, he knows how to express it with even the most impersonal drones.
So what happens when that same talent for evoking powerful responses is applied to a genre in which the heartfelt yearning of a Sensitive Singer-Songwriter, the lost loves, the spiritual revelations, has all become just a little...cliché, too expectedly earnest even for the most hackneyed acoustic guitar slinger? Well, if you're as skilled as DeRosa, two things occur. First, you find a refuge in minimal, subtly nuanced arrangements: a sparsely plucked banjo, some stray guitar chords or a piano, and understated, mournful vocals. You find beauty in the soft spaces between notes as well as the notes themselves, and you never once substitute emotional bluster when careful simplicity will suffice. Second, as long as you're singing about God and The One That Got Away, you still kinda fall in that murky goo that all singer-songwriters slog through.
Jon DeRosa's work is often truly charming and often deeply affecting, but by choosing to approach folk in such a conventional manner, he blends in with too many also-rans in the languid race for a grand acoustic ballad. DeRosa's gentle voice could be his ace in that pursuit, but why bother? It dominates the Alan Sparhawk (Low) mix so heavily that even when he overcomes the instrumental limitations of the form, it's still consumed by a big-hearted voice too unremarkable to bear the full weight of a melody .
It's an interesting choice to hide the music, since it tends to retain a slightly stale genericness and the silences are often the most compelling aspect of the songs, and on top of that, it further sets apart the truly affecting moments of These Are the New Good Times. DeRosa covers his own work (as Aarktica) in a gorgeous, string-heavy rendition of "Aura Lee", where replacing the thrumming background gauze of the original with crystalline violins and shedding the thick vocal distortions exposes the melody in it's rawest form. "Metropolitan Love Song" and "Sunday Matinee" also stand apart from the rest on the strength of the piano and strings, respectively, although at that point it's moot because they're still encumbered by the weight of the genre's (very, very heavy) traditions. De Rosa was better off bringing warmth to the arctic than trying to sell heart to a genre that always has too much to spare.
