Carter Tanton is a tough guy to pin down. Since 2005, he’s fronted hyped rock bands (the sadly defunct Tulsa), released solo records that jumped wildly from genre to genre, and collaborated with numerous top-tier indie acts, including Lower Dens, Twin Shadow, and Marissa Nadler. He's a hard worker with serious chops—as a guitarist, a vocalist, and a producer—but his career’s volatility has tended to keep these talents on the sidelines.
Jettison the Valley marks a fresh start for the Baltimore native, an attempt to reintroduce Tanton as a thoughtfully earnest singer-songwriter. (Tanton considers Jettison to be his first proper solo album even though it’s the third he’s released under his own name.) His last effort, 2011’s admirable-if-uneven Free Clouds, flirted with synth-heavy electronica, country, shoegaze and Paul Westerberg-worshipping indie rock—all recorded under a lo-fi haze. On Jettison, Tanton’s work coheres into a single musical vision—lush Laurel Canyon folk—and a single theme: the slow destruction of a relationship.
A bad breakup can be a crutch for a songwriter who isn’t sure of his abilities, a source of lazy metaphors and cheap emotion. But Tanton handles the story (Carter and his British girlfriend move to England, where they live in a caravan outside Bristol and later in a tiny attic apartment in Oxford, before calling it quits) with nuance and compassion. Tanton wrote the entire record in Britain while the relationship disintegrated, and the sorry tale serves as a much-needed counterpoint to the record’s florid, over-bright production.
Jettison’s excellent first three tracks set the tone: elegant fingerpicked guitar, pedal steel, thick harmonies, and supple, kick-heavy percussion reminiscent of Neil Young’s Harvest—a vision of sun-dappled California as seen through rain-drenched British pub windows. On the gorgeous opener, "Twenty-Nine Palms," Tanton finds himself standing in the California desert with his mind on a woman (possibly across the Atlantic, it’s not entirely clear) "who took me rather far out of view." While on the next track, "Fresh Faced Claire," the perspective flips: Now Tanton’s stuck in "the old empire" living in a "halfway home for the breaking down," his relationship slowly collapsing as he longs to return to the sunny West Coast. This dichotomy—California vs. England, sunlight vs. clouds, movement vs. stasis—remains in tension throughout Jettison, lending weight and a sense of drama to an otherwise rather straightforward collection of songs.
Beck’s Sea Change—a shining example of the hoary old breakup record if there ever was one—would be the obvious musical touchstone here, if it wasn’t for Tanton’s emotive, breathy, very un-Beck-like tenor. It’s an undeniably beautiful thing, and Tanton has never sounded more self-assured, particularly on the languid closer "Diamonds in the Mine" and on "Through the Garden Gates" and "Twenty-Nine Palms," both of which feature a welcome vocal assist from Sharon Van Etten. But Tanton’s voice is strong medicine: All that sweetness can turn cloying when the arrangements and reverb-heavy production are just as syrupy, as they are on the brooding Smiths-tribute "Poison in the Dart."
All of which leaves Tanton’s fluidly inventive guitar playing as the record’s most enduring pleasure. British folkies like Richard Thompson and Michael Chapman are lodestars, as is, oddly enough, James Taylor, whose mannered melodicism shows up on "The Long Goodbye." There are surprises too: The rambling title track (starring Marissa Nadler on lead vocals) stops abruptly just before the four-minute mark before embarking on an extended instrumental coda that builds to a hot rash of dueling 6- and 12-string guitars.
For his first major statement as a solo artist, Tanton could have made an entire record of jagged indie rock (see Free Clouds’ "Horrorscope"), woozy shoegaze (see Free Clouds’ "Fake Pretend"), or Day-Glo electronica (see anything from his recent synth project Luxury Liners). Instead, he made a fairly conventional country-folk record about a breakup. And yet there is great satisfaction in witnessing a creatively manic artist like Carter Tanton finally settle in to himself. On Jettison, Tanton quietly sits down, picks up his guitar, and, without fuss or self-importance, transforms himself into a singer-songwriter. Surely that is a statement worth making.
