Review Summary: Fairy Prince sings the blues
For someone who swiped his moniker from a famed 17th-century poet and builds his album art out of pop cultural detritus, much of what John Donne does on
A Mutable Feast or: the Ghost of a Flea feels very uniquely his. One of the most striking things about
A Mutable Feast is his approach to melody; he croons wearily through each song in patterns that manage to almost immediately establish themselves as “John Donne melodies”. These songs are largely built from melancholic, major-key walk-downs, with lines ending on a low note more often then not. Verses cycle back into themselves, choruses resolve back and forth between two notes. It’s difficult to capture on paper but almost instantly understandable on record: these songs, by and large, scan as totally idiosyncratic. If Donne were any kind of big name, I’d wager you could recognize a tune of his as readily as you might one of Elliott Smith’s or John Prine’s or Bob Dylan’s.
This idiosyncracy goes doubly for Donne’s lyrics (as well it should, this being a folk album and all). In this day and age it is very,
very easy to dismiss a proclivity for references as cheap crowd-pleasery, but
A Mutable Feast trots out a bevy of quotes and allusions to the pop music canon of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in a way that makes it feel less like an exercise in “get it?” and more like a tour of Donne’s very particular obsessions and quirks. Most notably, “Guitar Hero” crams a half-dozen lines from 60s chart-toppers (James Brown, Sonny & Cher, Tommy James, etc.) alongside pissed-off tirading against the very notion of a career in music (“I ain’t playing guitar again / think instead I’ll go buy a gun”). It ends up quite a rewarding juxtaposition, the constant reminders of the stars of the past making the giving-up-on-your-dreams bitterness all the more discomfiting. “Change (in the House of Flies)” and “Eye Turns West / Old Time Rock And Roll” both turn out as fascinating experiments in blurring the line between cover and not-a-cover, “folk” interpretations in the truest sense. The former borrows some thematic intimations and a handful of lyrics from the Deftones’ alt-metal classic to expose the vulnerability at the core of that song- the quiet terror of seeing a person become someone they weren’t before. Some of the added lyrics even, dare I say, make a case that Donne’s rendition winds up stronger as a piece of writing (“door that implies a cell / tiny hell / jail with toys” places the song emotionally in the Real World, in a way nothing in the original quite did). The latter pulls a similar trick, flipping Bob Seger’s unkillable dad-rock staple into something much more fragile and lonely-sounding, and while it never hits as hard as “Change”, it’s still a suitably jarring moment, emerging as it does from a completely unrelated tune and quickly veering off-course into surrealist scene-setting.
Even when he isn’t focused on mining the hits of decades past for spare parts, Donne’s aforementioned ear for melody and knack for turning a phrase manage to sustain more songs than they don’t. “History of A Foundling” and “Me and Van Eyck” both find success in simplicity, drawing out a simple structure with one or two winning lines and an instant-classic hook. “A Life in Wounds” sandwiches a wrenching spoken snippet between two gorgeous, indelible chants, and “Sweetwater” uses a cute little doo-wop backing vocal to set up a mid-tempo head-bobber about- what else?- a friend of a friend relapsing on smack. These songs highlight the whip-smart songwriter behind the album and they deliver the kind of truths that simply don't work unless they're set to music (or are music).
A Mutable Feast isn't perfect- it's far too interesting, too dedicatedly itself for that. At 56 minutes and 18 tracks, it can get more than a bit listless here and there, especially considering the album's rather limited sonic palette. If you can't abide nearly an hour of strummed acoustics and mournful wispy vocals, with only sparse additions of percussion and keyboard accents, this ain't the album for you. Songs are sometimes purposely presented as rough drafts that dissolve after a minute or so without properly concluding. All those track titles with a slash? Actually two songs, crammed into one track and strung together with whatever found-audio tidbits might be lying around. There's little in the way of concrete storytelling or direct emotionality, making it easy to imagine listeners with little patience for oblique symbolism getting irritated or losing focus after a few tracks. Perhaps most pressingly, the keys and other atmospheric additions have a tendency to wander; by and large they're not as thoughtfully or tightly composed as the guitar patterns and vocal melodies, and though they do add much-needed variety to the album’s sound, little about them is particularly memorable on a moment-to-moment basis. It’s far from a deal-breaker, but if future releases find Donne refining his abilities as a producer and arranger, stuff like “The Gilded Age” and “Planet You / Simian Cast” will, I think, have a much less easy time slipping in one ear and out the other.
Even when Donne’s execution is unfocused or slapdash, his outlook and his concepts are rarely less than compelling and never less than honest. If, as one of the album's alternate titles suggests, Donne is attempting to "further entangle the skein of life" here, I'm hard-pressed to deny his success. Life is absurd and tragic and sometimes unsatisfying and full of encounters with things we cannot fully understand, and so too is
A Mutable Feast. This may mean a great deal, or it may mean nothing at all, and we probably won’t know for sure until it’s far too late. Just the way it goes. The album ends with "Pain in Vain (No More Blues)", a song practically begging for the embrace of the void: “It seems so sad / but just for now / okay, I'm done / please get me out”. It’s a credit to the awkward, askew human-ness of Donne’s writing and performance that I couldn’t begin to guess if he’s happy or sad there.
