Joseph Shabason's: The Fellowship Review
by Howard Cressi-Stallworth
Toronto saxophonist and DIANA/Destroyer/War On Drugs touring member Joseph Shabason’s new album, The Fellowship, explores a familiar mood of uncertainty and change. Floating across multiple keyboard pads enter harmonizer-treated woodwinds, carefully played in their execution. Upon first listen, the instrumentation knows just where to fit on the first track, an indication where the other tracks will follow. Shabason’s The Fellowship enters and exits like a purple sky over one's stereo, filled with hushed instruments contrasted with acute percussion and percussive keyboards, exhaling muted yet warm and potent colors—like dark violet encased in crimson.
The track Escape From New York puts on display sputtering, controlled percussion, which overlaps with looping keyboard patches and contrasting rippled pads. It’s a disorentating feeling that further distances itself from the encroachment that the previous tracks embrace. Building to a crescendo, New York shows its uncomfortable yet harmonic dissonance by being upfront about its internal anxiety, mirrored by the percussion increasing in volume. The title track The Fellowship follows this trend by introducing natural woodwinds over FM synth style notes with chorused guitars in the background. I would be remiss to not point out Shabason’s unabashed usage of mid 1980s style instrumentation as an evocation of a certain era of musicianship, but his knowledge and use of composition is welcome enough to not write it off as a complete pastiche piece.
Further tracks 0-13, 13-15, 15-19 comprise a sort of suite featuring synthesis and fretless bass reminiscent of the 80s, creating a sort of day-dreamscape turned confused tension filled world built by Shabason. A looped, percussive marimba pans across the speakers while bass, dissonant guitar and recorder all play in fits and spurts as various ephemera enter in and out of the picture. While a handful of tracks over The Fellowship are exciting and are inviting, that’s not to say everything is of a certain caliber.
Tracks like Comparative World Religions use a simple electronic looping passage to put musical parts to for over three minutes. It’s a state of mind Shabason works with enough times throughout the album that you could easily write out it’s structure on a whiteboard: “Slow semi-percussive keyboard loop for a few minutes, followed by some stringent percussion and occasional keyboards, guitars that are imbibed in with anxiety filled tension”. This often feels underwhelming when over the course of the album Shabason shows he can do much more than just the often played out “looping keyboard semi-drone” piece.
All that being said, Joseph delivers many times throughout. Along with the title track, 15-19 is one of the best written tunes on the album. Guitars of multiple different tones float over garbled down pitched vocals and a calm spare beat while pads, harmonizer treated saxophones and other percussive items enter and exit. Whereas other tracks of this nature would just focus on the lame ooping and loping style of this instrumentation to simply create a vibe, the instrumentation’s unspooling of itself throughout this piece makes it evident that Joseph is writing and composing a song. This applies for So Long, which has the feel of a latter era Prefab Sprout song in its veins, calm with a feeling of goodbye in each electric piano chord. You have a notion that lyrics could fit to this music and instrumentation. Slowly blooming are electric guitars, natural piano, percussion tics, bass guitar, and perfectly plucked from that era, harmonic mute trumpet. All are played with feel and emotion, downcast and somewhat mournful, but ultimately with care.
The natural urge with pieces like Shabason’s is to state that the usage of FM synthesis, guitar effects, and keyboard pads are all to evoke a certain type of nostalgia and era which is lazy and not seeming to correct that over the last decade and a half. The endless nostalgia for “‘80s synthesis equals my childhood nostalgia” is tiring but a legit notion to understand and discuss. It’s been talked to death, but this soundbase was as prevalent as harmonized vocals in the ‘60s, ingrained in musicians' minds as deep as anything. Reading Joseph’s bio for the album, my intuition was justified. The Fellowship is as much a self-centered bio piece as anything, detailing Joseph’s upbringing as a child into a family losing their faith, all while surrounded by an preternatural familiar style of musical sounds. It feels lazy, condescending and sniping, but albums like Joseph’s are becoming more and more common each year. It’s important to process one’s pain, upbringing, faith and heritage to music, but it’s becoming increasingly fey and eye rolling when it’s to cloying nostalgic music queues.
The Fellowship is an exercise in utilizing the past’s sounds in a way his peers often don’t use it in: for the process of writing actual songs. The structures and the way the instruments weave in and out is reminiscent of the early 80s tendencies to pull from classic jazz and RnB structures of the Quincy Jones era showing that Shabason knows more than a palate of sounds, he knows the structure. If anything, Joseph knows how to compose instrumentation and create emotional passages and scenes. Shabason shows that you can use the past for the presentation of one’s own story and write about it as well. However, he still has a few moments to learn from in regards to pushing a few tracks forward. Considering how the good outweighs the middling, if he continues to grow then he will do fine. Those interested in ‘80s instrumentation could learn a thing or two from Shabason.
Spellling - The Turning Wheel
By Minimal
For an album conceptually based on cosmic balance and cycles, Spellling’s The Turning Wheel holds a fair amount of tension—tension created by fundamentally unbalanced music. Opener “Little Deer” reveals just how big Chrystia Cabral’s ambitions were with this release, featuring a whole damn orchestra and a ‘70s soul sashay. To put this in perspective, Spellling’s last effort was a quirky little goth affair made mostly out of an old ‘80s Roland synth; now Cabral uses choirs, tanpura, and a feature from a Tibetan folk singer. At its best, the composition mimics the baroque-psych of the Beach Boys, as in the transportive “The Future”, or takes on the qualities of a grim fairy tale, like in “Legacy” or the first thirty seconds of “Queen of Wands”. The latter is the best synthesis of Cabral’s early efforts and her new aspirations, as the opening’s fall down the rabbit hole gives way to total John Carpenter worship.
To be clear, hearing Cabral take such a dramatic step in this musical direction is quite interesting—at times even thrilling—but there’s no question that the ambition outpaces her ability to execute. For one, the vocal delivery is markedly different from previous record Mazy Fly: no longer partially buried in the mix for a purposely hazy sound, Cabral is in front, loud and bright. Unfortunately, this means we’re treated to bizarre and often tortured phrasing. If I wanted to be uncharitable, I’d say that a conscious attempt was made to imitate Kate Bush, only without any of the charisma. It’s not so much of a back breaker on the shorter songs—”Turning Wheel” and “The Future” are brief and lush enough where the delivery actually works to their advantage, making the songs wholly enjoyable—but several of the album’s longer songs are absolutely sunk by her performance. After such a brash start, the momentum from “Little Deer” is just about killed off by equally long follow-up “Always”, a forgettable ballad punctuated with less than enjoyable vocal runs; closer “Sweet Talk” also attempts to go for broke with even more runs, though with no real payoff in mind and no substantive songwriting to back it up.
The actual songwriting is a whole different issue, with your enjoyment of the album largely being dependent on just how far you can buy into Spellling’s occult and mystic affectations. Honestly, the witchy aspect of the project comes across as too juvenile at times, even broaching into something like limp New Ageism with the interminable “Awaken” and its silly bromides. Magic notwithstanding, the childishness extends to “Emperor with an Egg” and “Boys at School”, too. “Boys at School” is meant to be a real knock-out moment with its seven and half minute runtime, but we’re treated to an angsty dirge from a nearly thirty year old woman about not fitting in during high school. The big payoff is supposed to be a ‘70s classic rock guitar solo over a bored piano. As for “Emperor with an Egg”—it’s just plain weird and perfectly encapsulates the previously mentioned tension. Here we have a beautiful, inspired bed of orchestral composition sitting underneath a song about a penguin. The lyrics come across as a bad exercise in one of Cabral’s MFA English classes, once again veering into pseudo-New Age baloney, while the overly-affected vocal phrasing rears its head. It’s simply too bizarre to experience these clearly well thought out musical pieces with some truly goofy material grafted over it.
Even with these persistent issues, The Turning Wheel shows that Chrystia Cabral is maturing into a more confident performer, someone more willing to experiment. Hopefully she can continue to hone her skills and idiosyncrasies; I can’t shake the feeling that Cabral has a fantastic album within her.