Kevin Morby – City Music (Dead Oceans)

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Morby follows up last year’s breakthrough album, Singing Saw with a “companion piece”, which can be seen (and heard) as the flip side of the same musical coin.

With Singing Saw, Kevin Morby’s first release for Dead Oceans, the former member of Brooklyn bands Babies and Woods explored his singer/songwriter side, drawing from the likes to Dylan, Mitchell and Young and the pastoral sounds of Laurel Canyon.

This time around it’s the mean streets of New York City and Reed, Smith and (again) Dylan, who Morby calls upon for inspiration.

Morby himself describes it as, “A mix-tape, a fever dream, a love letter dedicated to those cities that I cannot get rid of, to those cities that are all inside of me.”

Judging from the sound of the first few tracks, the city that features most prominently is New York.

Opening track, Come To Me Now begins with a slow, industrial chug  and a lyric that addresses the loneliness that can come with living in the Big Apple.

“Ain’t got no family, ain’t got no kin”, then comments on the nature of the city itself…”You’ll burn in her sunlight, you’ll freeze in her night”.

Clearly, it’s a love/hate relationship going on here.

The following track, Crybaby, finds Morby trying on his best Lou Reed monotone….and it’s a good fit. The resulting nonchalant cool and smouldering intensity recalls classic Velvet Underground…think Waiting For My Man…with a bit of Suicide thrown in.

Track 3, titled 1234, is a full-on, if not appropriately brief, tribute to The Ramones, with Morby going full Jim Carroll at the end, chanting frantically, “Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, Tommy, they were all my friends and they died”.

Morby’s guitar playing rises to the fore during the Dylan-esque Aboard My Train, with Kevin’s guitar taking a Television-like solo mid-way.

Dry Your Eyes is a sparse, dreamy, late-night tune with guitar and vocals panned far left and right and a long, languid guitar fadeout.

A brief reading by Meg Baird from Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away, prefaces the album’s title track and centrepiece.

Clocking in at just under seven minites, City Music features a two-minute plus guitar intro that eventually evolves into what Morby has described as a “Velvets jam”. The interplaying guitar lines are beautiful and the song picks up steam as the beat accelerates and comes to a close.

Its at this point that the album loses its way a bit.

Tin Can has some lovely moments, but doesn’t quite resonate as strongly as the previous tracks.

Caught In My Eye, a cover by LA punk’s The Germs, is given a mellow treatment, while the remaining three songs all sound fine, but lack the intensity and emotional heft of the first half of the record.

Fortunately, they are all quite listenable, and do nothing to spoil the enjoyment offered up by the first seven tracks, resulting in a flawed, but beautiful jewel of an album.

Marty Duda

Marty Duda
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