When you first hear this album, you'll be transported into the Martin Sheen role in Apocalypse Calvin, surrounded by affable brass and a CIA spook at a meeting so classified it doesn't even exist. A young Harrison Ford will be playing this album's a capella paean to dispassionate mobility, "Nothing to Hold Us Here," on a reel-to-reel, sweating and dreaming of making out with Kate Capshaw years later in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. When the album finishes, the older guy across the table from you will utter some you-had-to-be-there blarney about the human heart and some vicissitudes he noticed it had. Then he'll say, "We think it is quite clear that Calvin Johnson has... gone insane," an assessment you'll be obliged to affirm. Then you will be told that you should "terminate his command... with extreme prejudice," and then there's some strippers in a helicopter, and then Larry Fishburne dies, etc etc.
During all the jinx on the boat, you'll read Calvin's dossier and sustain an intriguing inner dialogue: "This guy was in Beat Happening back in the day. He's a beacon of the unpindownable punk spirit. He's seminal. He opened for Black Flag. He's got the last chapter in Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991. He launched the Halo Benders and Dub Narcotic Sound System. Criminy-shanks, man, DubNarcSS released 'Booty Run,' as randily pragmatic a seven-inch to come out on this planet. Johnson's an institution, like marriage and Astroglide. His fingerprints pock the legacies of a stable including artists as diverse as Beck and Modest Mouse. He has his own respected label. So why the hell would he go back into the fray, alone, with just an acoustic guitar and his acquired-taste throatations?"
When you arrive at Johnson's bizarre Olympia compound, you'll find a zonked Phil Elvrum waving his hands around, welcoming you, calming but also alarming you, explaining that he was Calvin's 'engineer,' though he sounds more like a hagiographer. He will compare Calvin to poets and legends, and shudder when extolling the debilitating oomph of Calvin's voice. When you finally meet Calvin, he'll have been expecting you. He knew you were sent to nix him. In fact, he'd already started marketing his new album as 'posthumous.' He will sit in the dark, rubbing his head and explaining to you via a 4\xBD-minute (ahem) a capella song, how "The Past Comes Back to Haunt." By Calvin's side are the mysterious women Mirah and the Gossip's Beth Ditto. They join him in the also (cough) a capella "Ode to St. Valentine" and "Lightnin Rod for Jesus," respectively, which are gorgeous and grating, respectively.
Hi! Thanks for reading! You know, we've had a lot of fun here today, but sometimes a feller ort to shoot straight: the above was an attempt to disqualify myself from having to deduct whether or not this album is an achievement or embarrassment. I can't figure it out. The album sounds as tossed-off as it does deliberate. The songs are as preposterously conceived as they are straightforwardly delivered, as jokey as they are sincere. Did you catch my drift re: the perplexing amount of a capella stuff? Even as a fan of "the voice," I can't wholeheartedly recommend that you purchase this disc, which at points suggests that Johnson is eager to join Irwin Chusid's freak collection and become, like Daniel Johnston, someone whose work is better when covered (which is as good a tangent as any on which to propose that the seeds of the greatest Chris Isaak or Anonymous Crooner album ever are resting here).
But see: one point on this here CD, which is largely a 'love' project, provides a satisfying bellow of desire reminiscent of the first Smiths album. It comes right after the three-minute mark on "Can We Kiss?" which is otherwise essentially a remake of a similarly themed but more imperative Halo Benders song. Suddenly, Johnson emits an "ohohhhhohhhh" followed by an "uhooohhohhhowwwohh," that redeems the status of commingling foodholes; the kitsch is automatically baptized out of celebrating an old-fashion liptangle. "Love Will Come Back Again," despite offering the popular redundancy of back-againness, is equally convincing, especially when Johnson booms subtle hints to his intended such as "unbuckle that Gingham dress." The aforementioned "Valentine" will melt the sentimental lobe of anyone lingering in love's potential orbit when both vocalists collide to plead, "Ooooh, give me a sign."
Despite some increments during which the vocal loudness is poorly modulated, What Was Me is easily Johnson's best harnessing of his divisive foghorn. If I'd heard the avant-Guthrie of the scrappy, miss-me-when-I'm-gone title track on Internet radio, I'd run out to buy this album, being sure to topple several senior citizens en route to the store where the jaded hippie half-mans the register. Same goes for "Lies Goodbye," an exercise in the elasticity of enunciation (e.g. "rage" becomes "rayeeyayeeyage"). The individual songs may be more than the sum of their aggravatingly drumless parts, but this album as a whole is less than that sum. Choruses are repeated ad comatosium, and one is left to wonder what even a provisional backing band could have offered material like the six-minute, no-key-change, basic-chord "Palriga." Many of us are so pathetic that we want the album playing in our car after the club closes to be cool and gregarious-- What Was Me's sweet bloviations might get you snickered at.
Still, these songs have bullied my head for weeks. The island-strum of "Warm Days" has soundtracked my fascination with a hyper-gesticulating woman in the opposite lane who flips her cellphone the bird. "The Past Comes Back to Haunt," for some reason, was my mantra as I stared at an SUV sporting a Jason Voorhees glow-in-the-dark hockey mask hanging from its rear-view, with two pine-shaped air-fresheners in the eyeholes. Even "Lightnin Rod for Jesus" colonized my brain as I watched crows eat fries out of a McBin. Which brings me back to wondering if this occasionally-acoustic-only album is just a nominee for the time capsule labeled "Crazy Shit We Did With Our Freedom," or the masterwork of an aimless Cupid.
