Spend time listening to James Blackshaw, and two things should become readily apparent: that he is a phenomenally gifted musician and that his restless ambition drives him to continually redefine his sound. These characteristics have not always proven to be entirely compatible in creating a unified body of work. Few of us do anything quite as well as Blackshaw plays 12-string guitar, but by his own admission in a recent interview conducted by singer Marissa Nadler, after several brilliant albums he began to struggle to find anything new to say with the instrument. So on the recent records All is Falling and The Glass Bead Game he has largely abandoned the 12-string in favor of a more minimalist piano-based style and small ensemble chamber work. Though his albums have been consistently likable, there have been points where he has seemed to be deliberately working against his own strengths, pushing his sound in directions not clearly distinctive as his own.
In some respects, then, Blackshaw's latest album Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death is both a continuation of his tinkering and a slight return to his past solo work.The first big difference here is that his primary instrument of choice is a nylon 6-string rather than the steel 12-string guitar. This switch gives his new pieces an earthier, more exotic flavor than the celestial overtones of his orchestral 12-string style. And though Blackshaw's previous work has occasionally featured counting or other wordless vocals, Love Is the Plan includes his first recorded lyrical performance with a vocalist, Geneviève Beaulieu of drone/black metal outfit Menace Ruine and the folkier drone project Preterite. These subtle changes seem to have re-energized Blackshaw's expressive powers, and as a result Love Is the Plan is his most immediately satisfying album since 2007's masterful The Cloud of Unknowing.
As has been his habit, Blackshaw again draws inspiration from the literary world. The album title and all of the song titles here are borrowed from those of short stories written by Alice B. Sheldon, who published sci-fi and speculative fiction under the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr. For most of her writing career, Sheldon kept her gender a secret, and many of her stories concern issues of identity and alienation. Her style could be poetic and elliptical, and her themes abstract enough for readers to project multiple interpretations onto her stories. In other words, it is not hard to see how Blackshaw, a composer whose pieces are still predominantly instrumental and open to broad emotive interpretation, might be drawn to Sheldon's work and see parallels with his own.
At any rate, Sheldon's evocative titles are a perfect fit for Blackshaw's songs. Of the album's solo guitar tracks, the melodic "We Who Stole the Dream" stands as the highlight, and as one of my favorite things Blackshaw has yet done. His playing carries some of the echoes of his ornate 12-string flourishes, but here there is a grittier edge, with bent notes and the audible sound of his fingers sliding on the strings, his winding melodies casting out concentric smoke rings that call to mind Ben Chasny's acoustic work in Six Organs of Admittance.
Harder to classify is the vocal and piano track "And I Have Come Upon This Place by Lost Ways", which functions as a true duet between Blackshaw and singer Beaulieu, with each performer given equal weight in the mix. In contrast with his sublime guitar playing, Blackshaw's work on piano is more direct and measured, and on this track his blocky, almost jazzy chords storm behind Beaulieu's agile vocals. It is a mesmerizing performance, yet if listened to in a blind test there is no way it could be immediately identified as a Blackshaw piece. The same goes for the album closing "The Snows Are Melted, the Snows Are Gone", a melodic piano instrumental that seems to owe almost equally to Erik Satie and George Winston, and which seems tailor-made to have had vocals added to it as well.
In a 2008 interview with Pitchfork's Grayson Currin, and again in his interview with Marissa Nadler, Blackshaw specifically mentions his fondness for Big Star and the Beatles, and for singer-songwriters like Harry Nilsson and Judee Sill. On Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death, for the first time in his career it becomes easy to see him taking a lead from those influences and moving further into more song-based material and/or future collaborations with vocalists. Then again, trying to predict Blackshaw's next musical progression has always been a poor idea, and all that can be reasonably said for certain is that it will be worth some attention.
