|
|
|
|
|
|
Vic Chesnutt’s Star Power
By Vish Khanna
Over his storied career, Vic Chesnutt has worked with artistic luminaries, yet no collaboration has yielded results as powerful as his Constellation Records debut, North Star Deserter, which warranted working with strangers in Montreal and trusting the vision of Jem Cohen, a filmmaker turned record producer. Raised in Georgia, Chesnutt was in a car accident in 1983 and has been a paraplegic since his late teens. His Southern perspective and punk-infused folk spirit first garnered attention on 1990’s Little, produced by R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe. Chesnutt has subsequently collaborated with Lambchop, Bill Frisell, Emmylou Harris, and even Billy Bob Thornton for a small role in the Oscar-winning film, Sling Blade.
Mainstream flirtations aside, Chesnutt is a peripheral figure whose latest record includes contributions from Constellation artists Thee Silver Mt. Zion & Tra-La-La Band, members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, as well as Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto. With Cohen in charge, North Star Deserter is a stunning gathering, fostering relationships that Chesnutt has longed for.
“Jem really wanted to introduce me to this Montreal contingent and make a record with these guys because he just thought we would hit it off and he was totally right; we did,” Chesnutt says. “It was a very warm, open group of people and I felt an intellectual kinship with them almost immediately. It was almost too good to be true. I love Constellation Records; I love a lot of their bands and their approach to music they put out. It’s very heavy, from folkie to noisy, cinematic, and evocative, so it’s a dream to be on Constellation.”
When asked to discuss virtually anything about North Star Deserter, Chesnutt quickly credits everything to Jem Cohen. Friends for 20 years, Chesnutt and Cohen were thrilled to finally work together and it was Cohen who saw the inherent connection between the players involved. “Jem had ideas about how he wanted this to be very representative of two halves of my musical personality — the kind of stripped down, acoustic, raw things and then the distortion,” Chesnutt explains. “He also knows all of the musicians on this album very well, the kind of texture each person would bring, and he cast them for each song.”
Acclaimed for long form works such as the Fugazi documentary Instrument and shorter films about the Ex and Cat Power, Cohen is passionate about his work but views his role here modestly. “I think that most really fine musicians have a core and then they need to try other things,” Cohen explains. “They take twists and turns and sometimes, somebody else might be useful to remind them that their core thing is still vital and really powerful and doesn’t always need to be pushed away from. It’s not only Vic’s early records versus his later records because live and on demos, Vic would always return to that core. But in the studio he really got, I think, away from the core.”
In capturing Chesnutt on the masterful North Star Deserter, Cohen oversaw an organic, creative process, while applying his own working methods in Montreal’s Hotel2Tango studio. “Jem even sat right beside me when I was singing some of these songs and he’d tell me, ‘Yeah, I don’t like the way you’re singing that,’” Chesnutt recalls fondly. “He said, ‘You’re forgetting what you do the best, y’know? You’re trying to over-sing or something like that,’ he would tell me. So, it was very much like a director telling an actor, ‘Pull it in’ or that kind of thing, and I really enjoyed it. I think the result is one of the most focused and realised records I’ve ever made.”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
The Weirdness of Sunset Rubdown
 To say Spencer Krug is busy would be an understatement. A look into his day-timer would show enough tours dates, studio sessions and rehearsal slots to do most musicians’ heads in. But when it takes a whole hand to count the number of bands you’re in, this is the reality.
In three quick yea...Read More
|
|
|
Anonymous Twist Is the Dispenser
 Upon hearing that DJ/MC/producer Anonymous Twist is also a fully licensed pharmacist by trade, one is tempted to draw parallels and eye-rollingly bad drug metaphors and similes. But in a hip-hop landscape dominated by fatuous feuds and crass commercialism, it isn’t too corny to say that Anonymous Tw...Read More
|
|
|
Iron and Wine’s Guiding Light
 With minimal fanfare and seemingly less forethought, Sam Beam has led Iron and Wine down a fascinating path over the past five years, bolstering his haunting solo work and lyricism with equally compelling instrumental experimentation. Now a Texas resident, the Florida native has created a wondrous n...Read More
|
|
|
Torngat Make It Up
 It appears that Montreal’s fertile music community has yielded another left field winner with Torngat’s You Could Be. Here the orchestral noisemakers sound more confident than ever, thawing out traditionally icy post rock structures with bright melodies crafted from an assortment of organs, c...Read More
|
|
|
Band of Horses Let It Flow
 “You know, I thought it would go either way. I thought it would go really big or get panned super hard and people would be like, ‘derivative rock band, suck it, whatever.’ But, it did exceed my expectations. I never expected to sell 100,000 records.” So says Ben Bridwell, lead singer with Band of Ho...Read More
|
|
|
Japanther Put In Some Effort
 “Our shitty recording quality is just because we’re lazy,” says Ian Vanek, one half of Brookyn-based DIY punks Japanther. “If people are attached to that, it’s kind of funny.” Known for producing records that frequently sound nothing like the band’s bristling live shows — found-sound collages as opp...Read More
|
|
|
|
|
|
 | 
|
Super Mario and Zelda may have gotten more attention, but for those who grew up on Nintendo's original NES console, ExciteBike was equally iconic. Racing a motocross over jumps was awesome — but the ability to create your own tracks, even without being saveable on such a p...
Full Review
|
|
|
|
|