We're barely halfway through the year and Joseph Arthur has already released four EPs, launched a clearing-house mp3 blog called Bag Is Hot, and scheduled a full-length, Temporary People, for September. That tally doesn't even take into account his work as a visual artist working in both photography and painting (collected at his new website Museum of Modern Arthur). Arthur's relentless output-- likely to outstrip the parameters of the word prolific by year's end-- often seems like an outgrowth of his cultivated eccentricity, but there are deep contradictions embedded in his method: Certainly he controls his output completely, as he owns his own label, but his prodigious production implies something more akin to an assembly-line approach to creativity rather than an artist's careful self-editing. Furthermore, flooding the marketplace only dilutes the impact of the work, and in this case listening threatens to become more of an obligation than a pleasure.
A deeply idiosyncratic artist, Arthur is nevertheless not an especially innovative singer or songwriter, certainly less so now than earlier in his career, when he was messing with loops and delays, a one-man band creating a strange and provocative racket. There's very little racket on Could We Survive, to its considerable disservice. Tasteful yet never intrusive-- in other words, a bit dull-- the first of these four EPs portrays Arthur as a troubadour-poet musing briefly on life during wartime. With its military snare rolls and Dylan harmonica, the soldier's-eye-view "Rages of Babylon" manages to be anti-war, pro-troops, and not a little obvious. His stilted imagery and slightly detached vocals often conflict with the everyman perspective he's attempting to capture, suggesting an artist too far removed from his subject. At least "Morning Cup", bolstered by a delicate mandolin phrase, sounds suitably conflicted, suggesting a hopefulness that's all the more poignant for being so precarious.
Crazy Rain is more animated, more of a mess, and all the better for it. This is Arthur rocking out with mostly compelling weirdness: "Killer's Knife" is all filtered vocals and distorted guitars, "Nothin' 2 Hide" all brooding beats and Shaft guitar, yet they're both compelling in their surface pleasures alone, especially after the gravity of Could We Survive. On "I Wanna Get You Alone", he shows off a Princely falsetto, nearly inhuman and barely recognizable against the Twilight Singers-style backdrop (a few of that band's members, including Greg Dulli, appear on Crazy Rain). Yet, as much as he seems more attuned to these warped beats, droning guitars, and scribbled synths, he sounds uncomfortable on the glammy "Radio Euphoria" and the faux-angry "I Come Down".
For Arthur, working in the EP format might have been a means to jumpstart his creativity, to think outside his album-a-year box, but there's actually very little experimentation on these songs-- nor much we haven't heard before. Instead, the tactic seems to have reinforced some of his bad habits, such as equating brashness with innovation and using phrases like "the spaceship in my mind." The third EP, Vagabond Skies, mixes elements of Could We Survive and Crazy Rain, but not necessarily the good ones. These quiet, electrified songs sound pleasant enough, but indistinctive. Only "She Paints Me Gold" and "Second Sight" stand out-- and not in a good way-- the former because it features a long, pointless guitar solo (reminiscent of last year's fiasco Let's Just Be) and the latter because it volleys self-consciously between unremarkable verses and shrill, shouted choruses.
By the fourth EP, Foreign Girls, Arthur sounds as exhausted as, no doubt, the listener. These songs are almost impressive in their sparkling inconsequentiality. "Everybody loves foreign girls," we're told on "Foreign Girls". "Everybody wants foreign girls." "Stay" seems to exist only for the synth belches on its chorus, "New Satisfaction" for its slowed-down psych-rock organ riff. Good elements, but with little underpinning beneath them. Yet the spare arrangement of "Lovely Cost"-- just voice, guitar, and piano-- sounds genuinely off the cuff, as if Arthur went from idea to execution in the span of a short spring afternoon. Arthur can be compelling or boring, ignorable or annoying, and although the unevenness of these EPs bestows a strange sense of surprise and possibly even discovery, you still have to wade through a lot of crap to find the gold.
