Sage Francis has never feared silliness. I once watched the burly, verbose indie-rapper end a show by kneeling and touching his DJ's turntables while the DJ chopped up Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech with the Hendrix version of "The Star-Spangled Banner". And he brings that same tendency toward ridiculously broad gestures in his lyrics, which bounce back and forth between leftist fervor and self-lacerating slam-poetry. So it's something of a pleasant shock to hear Sage begin Li(f)e with "Little Houdini" a straightforward story-song about a (real-life) car thief who keeps breaking out of prison to visit dying relatives. It'd be easy to lean hard on any sweeping truths about the human condition in that story, but Sage keeps things simple and straightforward, sticking to the narrative and showing an eye for detail and a sense of empathy. "This ain't no country-western song," he snarls a few times, and it's to his credit that he's sort of wrong.
The big news about Li(f)e is that it's Sage's indie rock move. Rather than sticking with old collaborators like Jel and Alias, he's recruited a backing band that consists largely of members of the post-roots-rock crew Califone. Various indie-rock big dogs write the music for a song or two: Chris Walla, Jason Lytle, the late Mark Linkous. The inevitable Califone/Calexico crossover finally happens here, with the latter's Joey Burns and John Convertino supplying the music for "Slow Man". These guys fortunately don't attempt to come up with some sort of warped dustbowl take on rap; instead, they just vamp away, confident that Sage will catch whatever groove they work up. And Sage sounds pretty good on this stuff, his husky, authoritative growl taking on the sort of gravelly weariness that suggests he's got a few Tom Waits CDs scattered around his tour-van floor.
It's not a seamless move (the choruses tend toward all-consuming clumsiness), but it's a sincere one-- and it underscores how l [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| ittle Sage has to do with rap these days. In the past, Sage has taken time out to blast any and all forms of mainstream rap he can find, even shoehorning an anti-Jay-Z fusillade (over "99 Problems", no less) into that same live show. Here, he seems past that, barely even referencing rap and straying away from traditional rap cadence and even further toward the spoken-word stuff that he also does. If there's any precedent for this sort of musical move-- rap as impressionist Americana-- it's Sage's sometime Anticon-affiliate buddy Buck 65, a man Sage once publicly bashed for the crime of distancing himself from rap. Times done changed.
If every track on the album had the unforced lyrical clarity of "Little Houdini", Sage could have the album of his life on his hands here. But Sage is still the type of guy to name an album Li(f)e and a song "Polterzeitgeist", and the album comes packed with yeesh-inducing lines. ("I heard God is coming and she's a screamer", "That Wall of China ain't so great; I built a bridge over a hymen.") Like that hands-on-a-turntable scene, it's all a bit much. If Sage has a unifying concept here, it's organized religion and the difficulty of breaking away from it. But for rather than simply stating his case, his arguments too often devolve into word soup.
Sage breaks away from those riddles once more on the album, and the result might just be the best song he's ever written. The album ends with "The Best of Times", a pained memoir, Sage talking calmly and revealingly about his history as a loser kid, reeling off embarrassing anecdotes with tough candor. The music, from the French composer Yann Tiersen, is a gorgeous vibraphone-based twinkle that builds slowly and confidently, no guitars showing up for nearly three minutes. Over a track as gorgeous as that, Sage lets loose with some deeply cringey thoughts: "Considered doing something that would cripple me/ I wanted a wheelchair, I wanted the sympathy." It's the sort of song that forces you to root for the guy, no matter how much grim hectoring you've seen him do.
