During the months which
Another Thought was created, Arthur Russell was contrastingly withering away. Russell was heartbreakingly diagnosed with AIDS after the release of 1986's
World of Echo, and the famously prolific artist was finally, unfortunately hindered from making music, from living his well-earned and much-appreciated livelihood, basically. But not prevented: not even full-blown AIDS, not even nasty side-effects like fu
cking throat cancer, not even the chemo could stop Russell from making music. Thus,
Another Thought.
That's the heartbreaking story behind this record, released posthumously as a last hurrah to Russell's twisted, complicated legacy, before he drifted unfairly into obscurity until a resurgence came about many years later. There's also the music.
Another Thought looms far and above
World of Echo and all of those recently released compilations as the archetypal Russell record, one that blends all of Russell's different guises into one cohesive whole. It's his accidental masterpiece.
Much of
Another Thought is filled with the icy, fragile cello textures that filled
World of Echo, which perfectly accent Russell's cavernous, yet gentle voice, sounding ripped apart by pain and emotion on every track. That cello is key, and is important to why
Another Thought sounds so delightfully otherworldly. A guitar would be too exacting, see: Russell's cello is instead meandering and varied, ranging from the wall-of-sound of "Keeping Up" to the swift, bouncy melodies of "This Is How We Walk On the Moon", without ever losing the same ghostly, nightly aesthetic that the entire album carries, like blues for the anxious, insomniac sort. And with a cello.
That isn't to say
Another Thought is same-y, though, or ever runs together. Songs vary from drifty and abstract ("Home Away From Home"; "Losing My Taste For the Nightlife") to danceable and fun ("Me For Real"; "In the Light of the Miracle"), some even finding Russell shedding the cello for the kind of synthetic "mutant disco" he specialized in the early days of his career. But alas, Russell's vocals are as downcast and reverberate with as much echo here as they do on the darker moments of the album, being those moments where it's just him and his cello, when you get that mental picture of him wasting away, working on his album he'll never actually finish. It's like he's fu
cking drowning in it, the echo, it seems; almost like he just can't escape.
And I like that. Artists like Dan Snaith (Caribou) must like that too, as his recent
Swim hits a lot of the same moods and feelings that
Another Thought hits. That feeling, in particular, being where you always feel there's just something darker lying underneath, an ominous notion brought upon by the production, by the vocals, by whatever. It's what makes
Another Thought more than just a singer-songwriter album, more than just a disco album, or a electronica album, or some sort of avant-garde, performance art, Downtown music sort of thing. No, it's something else, entirely and totally. And, crazier yet,
Another Thought is merely an incomplete work; there was
perfecting to be had here, somehow. "It's all so unfinished"? The mind boggles.
, and yeah this is the best intro to his stuff. love is overtaking me is really good too but that's more folk-sounding and totally unlike anything else he did
