About 90 seconds into "Confetti", the stunning second song on James Blackshaw’s Summoning Suns, the guitarist hesitates as he begins to negotiate a particularly tricky—and, for him, rather unprecedented—passage. The first two verses have ended, a small string section has pushed the tune onto a carousel that might have suited Van Dyke Parks in his prime, and an ascendant third verse has thrust Blackshaw into a place he’s never been: a vocal hook that he has to sing himself. "The needless noise you air," he offers gently, the instrumentalist’s voice so soft and uncertain at the start of each word that he almost drops "the." "Echoes everywhere," he ends, pushing the last syllable with such force it seems he’s using his last bit of breath. It’s guileless, charming, and the anchor of a masterful few minutes of acoustic pop so good they make you ask an unlikely question: Why hasn’t James Blackshaw been singing all along?
A decade ago, Blackshaw emerged as a leading young stylist for instrumental acoustic guitar music. He’d started as many of his peers have, offering knotty revisions of songs with "blues" or "rag" appended to the title. (See last year’s reissue of his pleasing if predictable 2003 debut, Apologia, by example.) But he soon assimilated new influences into his six- and 12-string songs, from a classical grandeur borrowed from romantic composers to immersive atmospheres that seemed to reflect an interest in mysticism. Between 2006 and 2010, he issued a string of impossibly beautiful records in that vein, epitomized by his cascading Tompkins Square debut, The Cloud of Unknowing. Droning chords provided ballast beneath fluid fingerpicking, gilded sometimes by coruscating piano and strings. Blackshaw had transcended those formative blues to reposition existential sadness and spiritual wonder as self-made sanctuaries of sound.
But for the last half-decade, and perhaps even while he was issuing those pivotal albums, Blackshaw struggled with what might come next. He didn’t abandon his resplendent aims so much as try to find new ways to deploy them—intricate collaborations with lutist Jozef Van Wissem, improvisational exaltations with pianist Lubomyr Melnyk, accompaniment for the recent Current 93 records of fellow English seeker David Tibet. He tried contemplative classical guitar and clanging piano for 2012’s Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death. He built jazz-influenced, full-band noir for a live score to the 100-year-old silent film Le faux magistrat. All of it was fine, but none of it sparkled with the same sense of discovery his records once held. For the last several years, then, Blackshaw’s albums possessed an air of steady discontent and the demand that comes in trying to fix it.
For someone whose recent output has been so seeking and fitful, especially someone who has never before sung on record, Summoning Suns is remarkably decisive and self-assured. Blackshaw’s first recorded attempt at writing lyrics and singing them opens and ends with brief but significant instrumentals. "Averoigne" collapses the dramatic thrust of his work on the Magistrat score into two perfect minutes, glockenspiel and piano playing games of melodic ping pong over a roaring organ; "Winter Flies" is a modest reprise of Blackshaw’s career-making guitar majesty, his round sound and rippling strings suggesting a symphony tucked inside a soft gig bag. The core, though, comes in the shape of five bright, smart, and sad acoustic pop numbers. It’s as if, after years of letting the guitar speak for his thoughts and feelings, Blackshaw decided he might make his melancholy resonate anew by giving it a more direct voice—that is, his own.
The allure is instant: "Confetti", that second song, is as memorable and muted as the best of Jim O’Rourke’s pop cuts, and it reinforces O’Rourke’s love of extreme lyrical and musical dissonance. The drums gallop, the strings glide and Blackshaw’s guitar dances. But he and Annie Nilsson, the daughter of an obvious influence for such winking-while-grimacing fare, sing of suicide in bad motels and people so worthless they’re stealing the air from the rest of us. "Abusing angels, tearing their wings out," the pair softly intone, distending that last word to ensure you snag the sinister edge sticking from what seems a sweet song. "Nothing Ever After" and the title track chase self-doubt with more of it. In one, Blackshaw—somehow too beguiling to actually sound bitter—alludes to his public reputation as a white-hot guitarist who was never quite satisfied with that status. As the strings rise around the guitar, the effect feels like a high-fidelity treatment of Elliott Smith’s Roman Candle. On the latter number, Blackshaw acknowledges his self-destructive faults but turns them into a jubilant homage to the trouble they make. Piano and strings, drums, and his acoustic cavort beneath the confessions, positioning the song less about personal failure than dealing with it.
Picking apart Blackshaw’s references on Summoning Suns makes for easy sport. There’s Van Morrison and Bert Jansch, Sandy Denny and Joanna Newsom, the aforementioned Nilsson and Smith. Between the splashy sadness of "Confetti" and the Japanese tourism of "Towa No Yume", a pretty duet with Kaoru Noda, its writer, the cynical might even wonder if Blackshaw has recognized the (limited?) market potential of a world where Jim O’Rourke no longer sings. But Summoning Suns is a near-complete stylistic restart for Blackshaw, so of course some touchstones are clear. What matters more, however, is the preternatural ease he seems to have with this idiosyncratic pop, where the pedal steel peeks out from unorthodox places and the voices slide in uncanny curves. Sure, stylistic and mechanical hesitations pepper these seven songs, but even those instances feel mostly like the charming reservations of a brilliant beginner. That’s an unexpected status for James Blackshaw in 2015, but Summoning Suns and the future it could portend warrant the inertia they follow.
