Joseph Arthur has about as much freedom as a musician can get. He has his own studio, owns his own record label, and has a backing band on call whenever he needs them. Let his sixth album then stand as a reminder that, sometimes, freedom isn't a good thing. Let's Just Be sounds like it came together on the fly, in jam sessions that didn't stem from any kind of solid idea. There are moments on the album that left me speechless the first time I heard them. I just don't think I was properly equipped to process the precipitous drop in quality between Joseph Arthur's past offerings and this one.
Arthur peaked in 2004 with Our Shadows Will Remain, a lucid, occasionally even ingenious meditation on living in a time of war. But here it's difficult to find any focus. Moreover, Arthur's tendency toward experimentation seems to have devolved to rote sonic noodling that goes nowhere. There are a few quality tracks among these 16-- enough for a pretty good EP-- but this is an 80-minute album with at least an hour of stuff on it that sounds at best like studio outtakes.
I can get behind the gentle acoustics and subtle electronic shading of "Take Me Home", for instance-- it has a fragile beauty that echoes some of his best quiet work for Real World and Vector. The album's nine-minute finale, "Star Song", has some of that as well, combining an American roots aesthetic with some vaguely South Asian overtones, harmonica rubbing up against guitars tuned and processed to sound like sitars. It's startling to hear something so interesting and affecting close out a record like this, and it at least leaves some hope that this is merely a short detour in Arthur's career and not a sign of things to come.
Beyond those songs, though, there's not much. "Lonely Astronaut", the album's 20-minute centerpiece, begins on reasonably solid ground, with acoustic guitars strumming away, but Arthur's gravelly voice sounds like it doesn't even know the lyrics and he falls way down in the mix. After a certain point it just wanders off into a hideously boring vamp with sounds randomly rising and falling as voices repeat single syllables over and over but not in any particular pattern or rhythm. Listening to the whole thing, which I've done several times now, is genuinely grueling. It's exhibit A in the argument that having 80 minutes available on a CD doesn't mean you have to fill it.
Other songs are terrible for more pedestrian reasons. He sounds more like he's puking than singing as he screeches his way through "Cockteeze" over lumbering, sloppy riff rock, but it's not nearly as horrendous as "Shake It Off", where he sounds like he's trying to imitate first an eagle and then a sheep as he vocalizes the title refrain. It might be a joke, but if you weren't in the studio when it was recorded, it's not very funny. The next song is unironically titled "Lack a Vision", and though it's merely boring and not outright bad, it's truly an unfortunate phrase to have on the album's back cover.
There's plenty of evidence outside of the general sloppiness of the playing and forced-sounding "out there" production that this was kicked together in great haste: witness Arthur instructing the band on the form of the song in the middle of the already rehearsal-ish "Yer the Reason". He could have at least overdubbed the planned solo he mumbles about. It's almost disappointing that there's any good music on this thing, because the bits he seems to really be engaged with, like the faux-country of "Precious One" or the folky "Gimmie Some Company", are bound to be lost along with the rest of it, much of which is simply unendurable. Here's hoping he got it out of his system.
