You can almost see the piano: It sits in some corner room of an old church in a small Texas town. It's an upright, with a finish that's scuffed and scarred. A few keys are yellowed and cracked, others are missing their ivories, revealing the diagonals of glue beneath. The lowest G-sharp key is gone. The pedals are loose, the upper registers stick, and the lower registers sound fuzzy, so the best-- or least bad-- sound comes from the middle range. This image is most likely false, a romantic projection of the piano's precarious tones. However it looked and wherever it stood, Johnson must have fallen in love with the instrument, as it's the centerpiece of the first three songs of his new solo album, Vultures Await.
The piano is his only accompaniment on "Catherine Dupree", about a woman who burns down her alma mater, and the starkness of the arrangement works well with his bedraggled voice. "Just to Know You've Been Dreaming" fleshes out that sound with a full band, but that piano maintains its hold on your ear. But Johnson is a fickle artist, and by the fourth song, he's picked up his acoustic guitar again and left the piano alone. Next he falls in love with the sound of a violin, whose sweet notes curl around his vocals on "Just Some Silence" and "Sleep a While". Then he moves on to a drum machine on "Closing Down My House", whose coda layers programmed drums over real ones. The short "On, Caldonia" is just a simple melody plucked on banjo-- no voice, no words, just the instrument. You begin to wonder what he'll pick up next, until that piano returns in the penultimate "Fly, My Sweet Dove".
Perhaps Johnson's fickleness stems from his prolific rate of production. Over a decade, the Texas-based musician has released an alarming number of albums, EPs, and one-off concert-only cassettes not just as a solo artist, but with three bands: Centro-Matic, The Foxymorons, and South San Gabriel. He works at a rate of approximately one or two releases a year, which, along with the untold number of songs that never fall on any one else's ears, amounts to an almost Pollardian output. So Johnson obviously finds his inspiration where he can and for as long as it lasts, whether in a piano for three songs or a drum machine for one.
Vultures Await is the result of Johnson's musical restlessness, and it may be among his best-written and best-sounding collections to date. Gone is the garbled Americana pop of Centro-Matic and the sampled strings of his solo debut, Murder of Tides. In their place is a more fluid, flowing sound that draws more on typical alt-country structures and subjects; it may be more accessible, but it nevertheless seems sturdier and more disciplined. It could be Johnson's Heartbreaker, which may make long-term fans and anyone with a Ryan Adams phobia a little apprehensive.
He still has a penchant for the overly poetic, and Vultures Await at times sounds exceedingly, almost obsessively dark. On "Sleep a While", he proclaims, "The sea will not hold my soul/ The sky will not hold the stain." He expresses such sentiments most effectively in the more fleshed-out songs, but when he attempts to put them across armed only with his guitar, as on "Your Bulldozer" and "As Victims Would", the darkness becomes something closer to dreariness and his normally confident melodies dissolve like ink on a rain-soaked letter. The final track, "Nothin' but Godzilla" offers the only moment in which he seems to be having a good time alone.
Still, songs like "Just to Know What You've Been Dreaming" and "Fly, My Sweet Dove" are definitely memorable enough to anchor Vultures Await, and should attract new fans looking for music that is simultaneously sober-eyed and romantic, desert-dry yet saturated with emotion. And if not, he can always go back, hat in hand, to his piano.
