David Karsten Daniels is what you might call a folk composer. While he lives in San Francisco, his music's earthy tunefulness and gospel influences honor the rural South of his birth. But straight folk has an unvarnished spontaneity that Daniels permits only intermittently. While his core tunes are perfect for strumming on the porch, he dresses them up in arrangements and orchestration from jazz and classical music. His FatCat debut, Sharp Teeth, earned wide praise and equally wide comparisons to Will Oldham, mainly because of Daniels' voice. In practice, he's more like Sam Amidon-- placing at least as much emphasis on the setting as the song-- with a hint of the outsized sincerity of Saddle Creek-style emo-folk.
Daniels next album, Fear of Flying, squandered his gifts for arrangement on undercooked and punitively somber songs. The grimness was understandable, as the record was about his grandparents' physical decline. But his third major release, I Mean to Live Here Still, proves that he can address mortality without the doldrums. With new collaborators, robust hooks, and an energetic take on Daniels' signature sound, it's his best record yet.
I Mean to Live Here Still is a collaboration with the Virginia-based, nine-piece jazz ensemble Fight the Big Bull. The songs, with lyrics adapted from Henry David Thoreau, were worked out via mail, and then recorded all together in Virginia. As a result, they feel painstakingly assembled but not sterile-- in fact, they flirt with controlled chaos. Horns are a huge presence and span the tonal range from free-jazz splatter to Dixieland gaiety. The album's spirit of joyous lamentation often calls to mind New Orleans funeral marches, especially on the chipper "The Funeral Bell". But you're just as likely to hear cerebral percussion breakdowns and pattern weaves.
The drawback is that the songs occasionally get lost in the arrangements. The long, squalling breakdown of "Die and Be Buried" sets up an awesome drop, as does the sharking bass and percussion workout in the middle of "On Fields". But Daniels' voice is so crucial to his music's personality. It's supple and comfortable even at the limits of its range, where it tends to linger. When his voice disappears for long stretches, the album can slip out of focus. It creates the odd impression that the nine-piece band has muscled him out of the room.
But Daniels' ambition pays off when the band is more fully integrated. "All Things Are Current Found" is one of those big syrupy numbers he does so well, where layers of voices and instrumentation pile up sweetly, but with hints of impassioned sourness. The horn player on "Through All the Fates" earns an MVP award for his highly musical but comical turn: At one point he makes the horn "sing" the la la la's from the vocal melody; a good-natured razz. And this jazz unit is also able to handle more formal ideas, like the carefully stacked intervals of the slow-dawning "Each Summer Sound". Daniels is still working his way through some equivocation between art music and folk music, but this is the closest he's come yet to sealing the seams.
