In his 22nd year of music-making, Dave Pajo rules your whole family, holmes. He can do li'l wrong: the man had Drag City release his own farthing (in their catalog as DC170-COIN). What instrument can this Robotussin messiah not play? What ice-warm and bed-cold tone can he not engineer? What album bears his prints that isn't wondrous? (Okay, besides the Zwan one?) Listening to Pajo-related projects is the only thing that helps America get through what commercial radio calls its "workdays" more pleasurably than sneaking human obituaries into Petloss.com's registry of patriotic domesticated dead.
And glory be, Pajo squirts out singles like a tomcat does bastards. Better still: in order to survive Zwan's "Siamese Cream" road haul, Pajo plans to release a series of six three-song "AudioTour Diary" EPs this year-- the first two of which will be celebrated momentarily. Those of us who remember the fun of singles clubs and of chasing down rare comps and "vinyl" (before Soulseek democratized thangs for dispassionate posers computer-labwide) can almost get excited, almost!
Single One kicks off with "Flashlight Tornado", and though the music is the vintage mix of acoustic guitar, accordion, and keyboards usually associated with Papa M, you know something's up because Pajo sounds happy. Those who arrived at his work by way of his dour Drag City kindred, brace yourself for when he insists that "we do more than just survive." He evens goes Disney for the chorus: "Skippity do/ Skippity dee/ Doo rye yea." Hang your sundresses on the nearest antler, ladies, because Papa M's getting ready to bust out of his subtle-moan shell.
How can Pajo top his covers of The Misfits, Cat Stevens, Daniel Johnston, Bob Dylan, and Jerry Jeff Walker? Not by covering unknowns-- he already did that. So he covers himself, dogs. The revisited version of "Beloved Woman" is straight-up ghostly. The original (from Whatever, Mortal) started Smog-ominous and then went beatific with some vocal help from Will Oldham; here, Pajo removes the song's scaffolding and underbelly, and the result is nigh spiritual. All my laziness wants to say that its curdling violins recall a requiem-for-a-spleen battle between Kronos Quartet and Rachel's, but then Pajo comes in with that harmonica. Don't shoot me for heralding the arrival of chamber post-folk, because you'll swoon when you hear it.
Then he's back to covering others to end Single One and initiate Single Two. Draining the blues from Reverend Gary Davis' "I Am the Light", Pajo fashions an impressive gather-round ballad that's philosophically cousin to cohort Oldham's appropriation of D.H. Lawrence's "The Risen Lord". By the traditional "Black Is the Color" (as in "of my true love's hair"), only die-hard fans (I'm guilty) will still be awake. Even the sci-fi keyboards don't distinguish this from Pajo's surfeit of dirge material, and the lasting power of popular renditions-- such as the one by the recently deceased Nina Simone-- don't help, especially when Pajo's cover devolves into a spoken word piece, with one loop of Pajo saying "black black black" and the other saying "black is the color" like he forgot he wasn't covering Kurtis Blow's "Basketball".
The piano-and-strings "Mary Was the Kind" sounds like an outtake from the Songs of Mac EP, and provides a window to Pajo's songwriting formula: he crafts an inescapable, lilting, usually cyclic (repetitive if you're not feeling generous) atmosphere, mutters over it with some lame poetry ("I offered her a postcard written in the ink of the sea," or "Release the birds from my pillow") and then he buttons the thing with a profound abstract assertion ("We change without choice"). Whew. Consider me whipped.
"World's Greatest Sin" is upbeat, brisk, tuneful and casually, cleverly randy, but it wasn't enough, I thought, to save a lackluster single, until the guitar-and-strings bonus track stirred around the 12-minute mark and was so gorgeous it cured my chronic dyspepsia, eyebags and all. It's just, uh, derr... damn pretty. What do you want? So I'm not technically astute like my friend who can tell you what notes are being played and how; I'm an "impressionistic" music critic, okay? You win. My job's to compare the guitars to horses and get the fuck out of their way.
