It's the end of the world as we know it, and Vic Chesnutt feels just fine. "Warm" rouses his 11th album, North Star Deserter, with intimations of Armageddon, as the Georgian vents a nagging question over an isolated acoustic guitar: "Do they say that the end it is a'coming soon?" He can't decide if it's the rapture or the apocalypse, but he's not worried: "Anyway A or B, it's alright with me." This is the resignation of the powerless, and Chesnutt's act of removing himself from polite company-- note the military implications of that album title-- is not only a curmudgeonly comment on the terrors of our times, but also perhaps the only sane response. This is reassuring: his past few albums have traded bristling eccentricities for something closer to a cozy agreeableness, threatening to commit him to the Americana old folks home: The cosmopolitan Silver Lake in 2003 was his friendliest album to date, a sales grab to match all his critical accolades; two years later, Ghetto Bells, with Van Dyke Parks and Bill Frisell, retreated into weirdness, but the songs were overlong and largely impenetrable.
The more succinct songs on North Star Deserter sound like a return to the dark woods after years in the city. From this hermit position-- "my soul in its special hell," he describes it-- Chesnutt can read The Palm at the End of the Mind, watch everything fall apart, and record it in song after song after song. "The barn fell down since I saw it last," he sings on "Everything I Say", "it's rubble now, well so much for the past." Such wry understatements hold legions of ideas and interpretations, and his grim humor balances his dread. "You Are Never Alone", with its shuffling lounge beat, is his funniest song in a while: "It's OK, you can use a condom/ It's OK, you can take a Valtrex/ And it's OK, you can get an abortion/ And then keep on keepin' on."
As Chesnutt's self-reckoning continues, so do his turnstile collaborations. The crew on North Star Deserter includes Fugazi's Guy Picciotto, former Arcade Fireman Howard Bilerman, and all of the Godspeed You Black Mt. Zion! Tra-La-La Emperorchestra (or whatever they're calling themselves these days). Whether on a decorously loud song like "Debriefing" or a quieter song like "Wallace Stevens", their versatility allows Chesnutt to sound spooked and spooky, Southern and gothic without resorting to "Southern gothic." The quiet, contemplative verses of "Everything I Say" erupt into loud, scouring choruses that sound like white noise and black thoughts. "Splendid" reverses that pattern, beginning with an electric fanfare that gives way to a curious acoustic theme that gives way to a bizarre equine pastoral.
"Debriefing" makes the topicality of apocalypse a little too obvious, with a collage of newsroom and press conference noises that sound like Simon & Garfunkel are about to sing "Silent Night". Still, it allows the many musicians full rein-- for eight damn minutes! It's by far the noisiest, ballsiest, blusteriest thing Chesnutt has done, and whether or not it "works" becomes moot when the brimstone drums kick in around the six-minute mark, brutal like war footage.
But Chesnutt's voice remains the most curious instrument on North Star Deserter: His creaky vocals and peculiar pronunciation (which can locate unknown syllables in common words) may have diminished slightly since his first few Texas Hotel albums, but he sounds ornery as ever on North Star Deserter. On "Glossolalia" he spits sharply alliterative b's and d's, matching them to the percussively plucked strings as if warning you to back off. And yet he draws you in: On "Splendid", he sings, "We came across an incomplete set of..." He pauses ominously to make you lean forward and listen for the next words. That sense of mystery has served Chesnutt well over the course of a bumpy seventeen-year career. "Can't say I didn't rattle the load," he sings on closer "Rattle", "but I'm keeping it on the road."
