The work of Sacramento-based composer and musician Christian Kiefer has covered more musical and human geography in just the past couple of years than more land-locked artists might see in a lifetime. In 2006, Kiefer released Czar Nicholas Is Dead, an album-length meditation on the 1918 assassination of Russia's Czar Nicholas Romanov, as well as The Black Dove, a collection of more folk-based material with UK singer Sharron Kraus. Earlier this year, Kiefer began another fruitful collaboration with Charalambides' Tom Carter, and the duo released A Rather Solemn Promise, a set of spectral blues instrumentals. In each case, Kiefer has shown an uncanny ability to fully engage the character of his various collaborators while maintaining a distinctive voice of his own.
Kiefer's latest album Dogs & Donkeys might be his most ambitious and accessible work to date, and boasts another impressive roster of guest musicians. The album includes extended appearances by Wilco's Nels Cline, Low's Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker, and the Band's Garth Hudson (!), and none of their expert contributions are wasted. The influence of Sparhawk and Parker, in particular, seems to have rubbed off on Kiefer, as several of the pieces here attain something of the atmospheric, slow-pulse intensity of Low's early records, refracted through the dusky Americana of such previous Kiefer albums as 2003's Medicine Show or 2000's Welcome to Hard Times.
With a Ph.D. in literature, Kiefer has always been prone to compose his albums around a single prolonged narrative, and Dogs & Donkeys is no exception. In fact, these 13 songs simultaneously interweave two distinct narratives, drawing inspiration from novelist Saul Bellow, poets T.S. Eliot and James Wright, and an assortment of economics texts. (This is one of the few albums I can think of that comes handily equipped with a bibliography.) Unlike the relatively straightforward narratives of Czar Nicholas or The Black Dove, however, the basic plot of Dogs & Donkeys is oblique enough that even careful listeners might not fully realize it is there, nor will that fact necessarily ruin the album for anybody. Yet like his previous work, Dogs & Donkeys portrays characters caught up by forces-be they historical, romantic, or in this case, economic-quite outside their full control, and the ensuing, frequently tragic aftermath.
Kiefer sets his two separate scenes on two exquisite early tracks; the deceptive "Pretty White Clouds" is all sunny surfaces and Jayhawks harmonies, while the impoverished protagonists of "The Lovers" hunker down in tougher circumstances, hoping to ride things out surrounded by "seven bridges over seven muddy rivers." Before the listener is able to get too much further in this plot, however, Nels Cline makes his electrifying entrance on the pivotal "Economic Theory", his guitar reducing the quiet scenery to splinters.
From that point on, Kiefer and company ably mirror his characters' shifting fortunes with their fitful, dramatic music. The joined voices of Sparhawk and Parker help make "Coronation Day" a hypnotic standout, while Garth Hudson lends his unmistakable accordion to "Fisher King", which draws heavily from Eliot's The Wasteland as Kiefer delivers what is almost surely his most impassioned vocal on record. And though Kiefer falls short of spelling out the exact fates of his characters, all those bridges and rivers seem to have an almost unshakable pull, and the defeated cries of "Lie Still" and "Slow Rivers" point to an unhappy ending at the water's edge. The finer details of its narrative notwithstanding, Dogs & Donkeys again shows Kiefer's willingness to tackle wide-scale, novelistic themes, and to do so with an uncommonly sympathetic ear pitched towards both his material and his collaborators.
