The feeling that the world used to be better, clearer, or more pure has been historically persistent enough to suggest that it's a fundamental part of being human, and it logically encompasses music as well. Arguments against reactionary ideologies such as rockism often hang upon accusations of social prejudice, which certainly can be a component of it. But there's a more empathetic and equally plausible explanation: It's not that new music is inferior to old music (although the feeling often gets twisted this way), but that older music's obsolescence can make us uncomfortably aware that the same thing could, and likely will, happen to much of what we listen to today.
Being trapped in this relentless forward momentum, with losses stacking up behind us, perhaps explains why, as popular music moves ever forward, the individuals creating it tend to move backwards. Punks eventually try their hand at country, indie rockers get into classic rock, and Adem, aka the guy from Fridge who isn't Four Tet, puts aside post-rock and neo-folk long enough to record Takes, a largely acoustic album of unpretentious covers rendered more emotionally than cerebrally.
Takes mainly consists of Adem's charismatic voice and deft acoustic guitar, although a kitchen sink's worth of embellishments, from vibraphone to dulcimer to autoharp, flesh it out. It has a heavy nostalgia component, as all of the covered songs were originally released between 1991 and 2001, Adem's self-professed formative years. This lends it a backwards-looking, "120 Minutes" vibe, and bolsters its sense of longing regression. You can tell from Adem's earnest renditions that what he's singing here is less a collection of covers than a specific, intensely personal vision of his life. His evident love of his source material and the material's alternative-era continuity make Takes a vanity project that's much better and more universally appealing than what we usually mean by the term.
Adem renders his source material in a homogeneous style, so that it actually sounds like a bona fide album whose rewards aren't contingent upon familiarity with the covered songs. For anyone who was young in the 90s, however, familiarity will augment its appeal. The best part of Takes is Adem's song choices, which tend to be surprising even when the artist choices are not. The feeling of burgeoning recognition is so pleasurable that I'd advise listening to the album before you read the track list, or the rest of this review. It's a lot of fun to listen to a lyrical, hammer-on intensive acoustic melody with a sense of near-maddening familiarity until a certain lyric makes you realize that you're listening to Smashing Pumpkins B-side "Starla", spliced with a bit of Gish's "Window Paine".
This splicing speaks to Adem's infectious, fanboy enthusiasm in constructing this album, which reportedly came about because fans frequently ask him for recordings of the solo covers he plays live. When he couldn't settle on just one track from a beloved artist, he simply hybridized two. So a loping, easygoing version of Bedhead's "Bedside Table" mingles with a bit of "The End of the Day", and Aphex Twin's "To Cure a Weakling Child" and "Boy/Girl Song" get wrapped up in one twittering, bell-laden folk number. (Yes, Adem not only transcribed Aphex Twin songs for acoustic guitar, but he did a great job of it-- its gentle, upsweeping chorus is an album highlight.)
Plus, he's got a nice voice, and a nice voice is crucial for this material. It's just rough-edged enough to sound "alternative," but versatile enough to assimilate Björk's gulpy murmur (on a hovering version of "Unravel"), PJ Harvey's gruff purr (on an ornately finger-picked "Oh My Lover"), and Yo La Tengo's laundry-fresh harmonies (on a weary yet oddly uplifting "Tears Are in Your Eyes"). Mix in some Lisa Germano ("Slide"), Pinback ("Loro"), Breeders ("Invisible Man"), and Tortoise (a pretty but negligible "Gamera"-- the instrumental doesn't quite suit this vocal-centric album), and you've got a veritable '90s nostalgia-bomb on your hands. And maybe it's at least accidentally significant, as regards the desire to stop time and preserve lost innocence, that the most recent cover was released in 2001, right before a few hijacked airplanes set in motion a chain of events that would make life more complicated and perilous for most everyone.
