It's hard to stand out in the world of independent music. "College Grad Moves to Fashionable Urban Enclave and Starts a Garage Rock Band" isn't the most compelling headline, regardless of whether the music is any good. How do you get people to pay attention? One common method in the last couple of years has been to swaddle your music in the gauze of "mystery": no bio, no photos, a cryptic name that puts the artist one step ahead of the engineers writing Google's search algorithms. Another is to actually live an unusual life before you first sit down with a publicist to write a press release. This is the path of Chicago's Willis Earl Beal.
Before news came earlier this year that he'd signed to a subsidiary of indie giant XL, very few people outside of Chicago had heard of Beal. A profile in the Chicago Reader from July of last year told the story of a 27-year-old African-American man who grew up on the South Side of Chicago, had been in the Army, lived with his grandmother, bummed around Albuquerque, and sometimes left CD-Rs of his music in random places. He was a visual artist who had drawn the attention of Found Magazine. He printed his phone number on flyers and invited people to call him and he would sing them a song. He busked a capella on El platforms. After the news came that he'd signed to XL, we discovered that he had auditioned the reality television show "The X Factor". Add it all up and the urge to ask, "What's the deal with this guy?" is overwhelming.
Beal's debut album, Acousmatic Sorcery, which consists of of home-recorded songs stretching back over the last few years, doesn't answer this question. But it does suggest that the answer, when it finally comes, may well be fascinating. The first thing working in Beal's favor is his astonishing voice. One moment it's a soft and modest whisper, the kind of instrument that makes you want to lean in a little bit to make everything out. On songs like "Sambo Joe From the Rainbow", "Monotony", and "Evening's Kiss", all of which are sung quietly with just a steady strum of a guitar string or two, Beal is firmly in the mode of the late-night home-recording folkie. All seem like songs he might have recorded at 3 a.m. after being asleep for an hour two, trying to get them down before a short burst of dream inspiration faded. They are haunting and beautiful, and his barely-tuned guitar strumming, as well as the hermetic and occasionally surreal lyrics, brings to mind Jandek, an artist he admires.
But this is only one of his modes. "Take Me Away" finds Beal singing in a full-throated howl on a song that touches on blues by-way-of-field-holler. Accompanying his moans and growl is some kind of cheap, distorted hand-made percussion. Here Beal's love of Tom Waits is readily apparent-- if Waits stuck a version of "Take Me Away" on the back half of Mule Variations no one would have batted an eye. And then on "Ghost Robot", Beal does a (awkward, ultimately) version of rap that actually feels closer to Lost Poets-style proto-rap than anything hip-hop proper has produced in the last 30 years.
"Ghost Robot" aside, Beal brings something to the table no matter what kind of music he's making, and the highlights of Sorcery are impressive. But there's also a nagging sense that the songwriting and vision hasn't quite caught up with the talent. His lyrics have too many clunkers, his songs don't seem quite developed. In a different world, this would be Beal's third or fourth release, the one that comes after a couple of strong albums, serving to show his fans that he was doing something interesting early and on his own. This is not to say that the four-track lo-fi approach can't lead to great and important music-- see the recent issue of Weed Forestin', the first solo release by Lou Barlow's Sentridoh. Sometimes crude technology suits the music perfectly. But Beal's music seems to want something more. Songwriting aside, in his case, the limitations feel like just that-- something that prevents the work from being fully realized.
In that respect and a few others (the impressive vocal range, songs filled with introspection an ear for junkyard percussion) Beal has something in common with tUnE-yArDs circa BiRd-BrAiNs, even if his songs don't stand up to where Merrill Garbus' were then. So while Acousmatic Sorcery is interesting and occasionally even great on its own, it ultimately feels very much like a hyper-creative and gifted artist trying to figure out what he's doing. He's woodshedding, and it's often rewarding to listen in. But even during the best moments, you can't help thinking ahead to what might come next.
