Acousmatic Sorcery, the 2012 debut by Chicago songwriter Willis Earl Beal, was an album of mysterious, crudely recorded folk and blues that wouldn't have gotten half the attention it did if it weren't for Beal's backstory. An army vet drifting from Albuquerque to his grandma's house on Chicago's South Side, Beal released his earliest recordings via CD-R, usually accompanied by hand-drawn zines, left, as he put it to GQ, "all around the hipster places and the coffee shops"-- places where Beal rightly guessed that people would be drawn to strange, singular art objects that seemed like missives from a subterranean world.
If that all sounds calculating, it's because it was: Like his hero Tom Waits, Beal presented himself as a savant-like character who just crawled out of the swamp but was in reality a savvy performer aware of peoples' longstanding fascination with outlaws, boogeymen, and characters who present themselves as forces of nature rather than products of society. At one point last year, he even told Time Out Chicago he wanted to be an outsider artist, somehow forgetting that one of the conditions of being an outsider artist is not knowing you're an outsider artist.
Thankfully, Beal's backstory isn't as relevant to Nobody Knows, which in 2013 arrives more or less like any other album: Recorded in a studio, released by a label (instead of picked up by one retroactively), marketed, hopefully, like the work of another singer-songwriter just elbowing his way through the crowd. The music is more diverse and expansive than it was on Acousmatic Sorcery, which is probably just a function of better resources: Sounds and styles Beal only had the tools to hint at before are rendered professionally and in high definition, and his voice-- a bellowing, conventionally soulful instrument-- is given the sonic space it probably deserves, sitting in the mix like an old iron anchor.
The songs on Nobody split their influences between old-fashioned blues and indie ballads, replete with the sounds of glockenspiels and warm, staticky ambience. The modes aren't all that different. Blues ballads, like indie confessionals, can be almost threateningly intimate, like a cage built from the singer's feelings designed to trap and hold a listener in place. Parts of Nobody-- like parts of Acousmatic Sorcery-- imitate nervous breakdowns, sexual frenzy, and other states of uncomfortably heightened awareness, but that's the point: A born seducer, part of Beal's routine is to draw his listeners into dark places, lower his eyes, jingle a set of keys, and grin.
Like Waits, Beal is a mishmash of tropes made from a shared language you know without having to be taught it: he's "Cool like a fool in the summertime" on the hymn-like highlight "Wavering Lines"; he's "in transition goin' from town to town" on "Ain't Got No Love"; he's "nine hard inches like a pitchfork prong" on "Too Dry To Cry". He's a shadowy figure skulking the streets at night; he's a corner-store preacher on the brink of revelation; he's a little hambone and a little field holler. He's less a blues singer than a blues incarnate-- an artist that will appeal to people more interested in blues as a theatrical concept than a genre of music.
Which is all to say that despite his apparent idiosyncrasies, Beal is pretty up the middle. Compared to TV on the Radio, Autre Ne Veut, or even Daughn Gibson-- all of whom have experimented with weird, histrionic mutations of the blues-- Beal sounds like a traditionalist more interested in moving ideas around than expanding on them. The real irony of Nobody Knows is that it makes him sound like a more fully realized artist, but a more conservative one, too.
