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The received wisdom on Karl Blau is that he operates along the same lines as hyper-literate, folky singer-songwriters like former bandmate Phil Elverum or Bill Callahan: a conduit of tall tales, dusty country-tinged narratives and subtle heartbreak. And while there is some truth in that – witness the Smoggy stylings of Pasadena for exhibit one – there’s also something else going on amongst the widescreen landscapes and clever lyrical turns of Vultures of Love, something altogether more strange.
Blau, now based in Philly after spending much of his musical life in Anacortes, Washington, has begun to embrace more and more esoteric influences as his career has progressed. Perhaps this is to be expected. Let’s not forget that this is someone who has worked on upwards of 250 albums in a career stretching back to 1996, someone who has shared studios with Matthew E. White, Laura Veirs, and the aforementioned Elverum, someone who once presided over a Sun Ra worship group. What’s so refreshing is how he embraces such a wide range of influences in such a guileless, easygoing way. There is little pretension in his experiments, no cynicism in the way he guides an apparently simple folk-pop song, for example, into the choppier waters of funk or psychedelic soul.
But although he wears his influences lightly, there is no disguising the weight of his themes. On Who, he tackles death and the afterlife over a musical landscape scattered with horns: Blau’s beloved Sun Ra is a key reference point here, and also on spacy, dubby, politically-charged jazz-pop of Taxes. Pasadena turns what at first sounds like a fairly standard alt-country chug into a musical high-wire act between blissed-out psychedelia and yearning melancholy.
These songs have a delightfully organic feel. Mistakes are left in, built around, burnished and transmogrified into shining cores which light up a specific passage from within. The strum-and-horns combo of opener Bee Song sounds like it was recorded without any prior planning, and it’s all the better for it. The title track pairs up a dissonant guitar with a vocal melody that wouldn’t seem out of place on Paul McCartney’s Ram; it’s a song of multiple personalities: playful, sinister, oddly self-assured.
A real album highlight is Back On Track, the musical equivalent of a drunken game of Frisbee. Loose and bluesy, hauling in lo-fi electronic splurges, never caring too much about the destination but enjoying the journey. Similarly, While the Night Is So Long is so laid back that it almost sounds like it’s about to stop existing until an effortless chorus makes it fly. The obvious comparison is Mellow Gold-era Beck, but Blau’s slacker blues never approaches self-parody or highly curated artsiness.
Instrumental The Heavy Light of Sad and Dance throws a bunch of synths and futuristic horns at a churning country-rock rhythm section and makes it stick: it sounds like homemade robots scaling the walls of the Grand Ole Opry. Closing track For the Babies starts off like it’s going to be some high-production Todd Rundgren thing, then lapses into DIY garage band territory, with a hint of anti-folk. No two tracks are the same here. Most aren’t even remotely alike. But the aura that hangs around the album is consistent, and that’s a feat that can only be pulled off by a consummate artist, in full control of his craft despite the apparent looseness of it all. Vultures of Love is an album that deserves to be listened to all the way through: when taken together, the hectic elements that make up each individual song coalesce into something whole (and strangely wholesome), and that’s a beautiful thing to experience.
Vultures of Love (18th October 2024) Otherly Love
Bandcamp: https://klaps.bandcamp.com/album/vultures-of-love
KARL BLAU LIVE DATES
10/18 – NYC, NY @ Mercury Lounge
10/27 – Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda’s
11/3 – Los Angeles, CA @ Scribble
12/4- Seattle, WA @ Tractor Tavern
12/5 – Anacortes, WA @ The Unknown
12/10 – Tacoma, WA @ Spanish Ballroom
12/11 – Quilcene, WA @ Quilcene Lantern
