Two years ago, summer was in full swing, the sun was shining, and James Toth had ten thousand records out. "It's a fucking epidemic," wrote Pitchfork reviewer Brandon Stosuy, before giving Wooden Wand's solo outing Harem of the Sundrum & the Witness Figg the notice it deserved. Toth had departed from his signature improvised collaborations with the Vanishing Voice in order to make a minimal, surprisingly spiritual collection of unadorned songs. Who knew for sure, before Harem, that beneath all the improv and WWVV's mountain-man affectations the group included at least one real songwriter? Harem staggers into the present as one of a few survivors of the plague of forgetfulness than has pretty much sent "free-folk" back to the wispy place from whence it came.
Wooden Wand & the Vanishing Voice tapered off soon enough-- though not before releasing the NNCK-jazzed Gipsy Freedom last year-- and according to Toth are pretty much done: after James & the Quiet, he's retiring the Wooden Wand mantle. James is a close cousin to Harem, featuring as it does Toth stripped down. But where Harem, in retrospect, benefited from the rush of creativity Toth was surfing-- its lo-fi unfinished veneer and Shrimper-style tape-distortion had all the hallmarks of a quick in-and-out job-- James & the Quiet is a more deliberate animal. Produced in rich fashion by Lee Ranaldo, who also plays on the record, Toth's new record features comparatively elaborate arrangements built around the same basic guitar and vocal template, and not always for the better.
Listen to "The Pushers" and hear just how much more he's singing, how focused the mix is on his lyrics and voice. This is a bit strange, given that his writing tends towards the nonlinear and the oblique-- say, the Dylanesque koan of "mutants and monsters did gather in the mausoleum," from "Invisible Children". A more favorable Dylan comparison (well, here's third: Toth's voice can be brutal) might apply to the nigh ecstatic "Spitting at the Cameras", a slow motion and abstracted "To Ramona". "Spitting" is raspy and melodic and beautiful. There, as elsewhere, Jessica Toth helps out with the vocals, and her voice is wonderful-- a husky hyper-articulated alto, an even tone skating easily over a whisky-soaked vibrato.
James & the Quiet is Toth's attempt at a singular presentation of himself as an artist-- "an un-weird record," in his terms, designed to be music more synonymous with its creator than the wah-wah pedal wash that characterized his output with the Vanishing Voice. Along with "Spitting", the mid-record pairing of "We Must Also Love the Thieves" and "Invisible Children" arrives at this sort of portrait of the artist as back-porch master, playing sing-along songs in all the places you weren't at but wished you had been. As he writes in the latter, "There's nothing in the light/ Just invisible children we sing to at night."
But a little bit of this stuff goes a long way. The country-cooked minimalism of the drawling "Blood", the snake-charmer sleaze of "In A Bucket", the adjective-plagued "Blessed Damnation" (e.g., "The residue of collegiate superstitions will not be removed/ So you take your own gristle-caked notions for a walk in a dream")-- it all starts to feel like somebody sticking their tongue into your ear.
The fastidiousness of the sound on James, and the heavy emphasis on the artist at the other end of the speaker, can be a trap for Toth. In 2005, the distant production and spontaneous aesthetic of Harem of the Sundrum & the Witness Figg held a lot of this discomfort at bay, even it if it cost Toth some notice. Maybe now he's overcompensating?
