As the story goes, John Vanderslice returned home to San Francisco after a lengthy tour supporting 2011’s White Wilderness only for his wife of six years to swiftly announce that she’d be leaving him. He went out into the woods of Northern California and hiked around by himself, all the while pretty much losing his mind. He decided he needed to Do Weird Stuff again musically, which-- with all due respect to his last few albums-- involved getting back to what made him great in the first place, besides the enduring, secretly genius storyteller thing. So he quit his former label, Dead Oceans, because he wanted full control in his endeavor to put himself back together with Dagger Beach, and to write a love letter to his idol with a reinterpretation of David Bowie’s 1974 Orwellian concept album, Diamond Dogs. (Vanderslice funded the project with a Kickstarter campaign that made three times his total funding goal.)
Many of Vanderslice’s most effective songs are clearly fictional, but he commits to them fully. On Dagger Beach, the songs are more clearly personal-- detailing the dissolution of his marriage-- and he executes them with the same specific eye: “In the last known photograph/ Of you and me sprawled on the grass/ You looked off frame/ You were through with this stupid play” (“North Coast Rep”). Unsurprisingly, these songs taste pretty bitter going down, even when they're pretty acoustic numbers like “Song for Dana Lok” and “How the West Was Won”, whose opening riff treads in Fogerty lawsuit territory. “Harlequin Press” is the big exception to this personal vibe, and its clever punchline about a writer who sacrifices personal truth for what the audience wants is a classic of Vanderslice’s fictional storytelling method.
Vanderslice has abandoned the polish of White Wilderness here, though that album’s crucial backing band, Magik*Magik Orchestra, provide woodwind, string, and brass arrangements. Highlight “Song for David Berman”-- an ode to the Silver Jews leader-- leans on strings, inciting a sense of growing eeriness set against a sparse acoustic guitar. It’s one of the only instances on the record where Vanderslice convincingly conveys his pain musically rather than lyrically. It's not a problem of polish vs. lo-fi, but a series of songs rendered so angular that the overall effect feels aimless, an effect that gets old on Dagger Beach. The lack of structure makes these songs feel experimental, but not sufficiently to commit to being out there in a remarkable way.
As far as experimentation goes, Diamond Dogs is a stronger bet. Rather than merely covering the album (which he performed live in full last year), Vanderslice takes the hits and turns them on their heads, changing lyrics, even titles. “Juvenile Success” (that's “Rebel Rebel”) is a twinkly, soft-spoken affair that feels more like a Belle and Sebastian single than anything Bowie did in his most shamelessly glam moment; the line, “Hot tramp, I love you so” has never sounded so polite. “Would You Possibly Rock and Roll With Me?” (a.k.a. “Rock‘N’Roll With Me”) sounds like a church organist messing around following Sunday services, long after the congregation has filed out. While songs like “We Are the Dead” amplify their original greatness by ramping up the noise, by and large, it’s all sonic effect without much of the attitude and soul that actually drew people to these songs, and the curiosity factor wanes quickly.
For a longtime professional musician who woke up one morning and called off his record deal, Dagger Beach is not as experimental as you'd expect. The Bowie redux, however, is a different story. It seems as though the mere act of bringing new life to one of Bowie’s lesser-canonized albums brought joy to Vanderslice in his difficult days. Even if it's not required listening, if that new lease reflects back on him, it will have been worth it.
