David Axelrod - Earth Rot
April 22nd, 2008 | 12:30 pm est |
After the sublime excess of his two takes on William Blake, with Song of Innocence and Songs of Experience, David Axelrod went bonkers and issued the single weirdest record of his career that stands pretty much unparalleled more than 30 years later. Earth Rot is in effect a cantata for the planet, or, in Axe’s own words, “contemporary music with ancient yet timely words set to the theme of ecology.” Those ancient yet timely words come from the Book of Isaiah in the Bible and a Navajo legend called “Song of the Earth Spirit.” There’s a nine-piece choir singing these texts, accompanied by a 15-piece orchestra that includes Ernie Watts, Earl Palmer, Willie Green, and Jack Kelso. Capitol’s Studio B must have been humming with the mojo for these dates.
Musically, each side is divided into four sections. Side one deals with the warnings themselves. Axelrod’s musical begins by celebrating the earth’s lorry and then indicting humans for messing it up. With gorgeous tings of flute and guitar, he underlines his upfront horn section with a shimmering grace. Side two are the warnings themselves, and Philip Glass’ chorus lines in his opera were influenced by Axelrod’s, I swear. The half-step dissonances between pitches, the long lines, the glimmer of consonance as the music enters the front of the mix with Ernie Watts blowing like crazy. In all, though, for as dark as it was reputed to be at the time, this is a blissed-out album musically. Gorgeous, lush, and full of gentleness, if it weren’t so strange, so completely out of sync with everything that came before and after it, there might be a context in which to give it a higher rating. Bottom line, though, is that he was never this consistent again.
- “The Warning Talk, Pt. 1″
- “The Warning Talk, Pt. 2″
- “The Warning Talk, Pt. 3″
- “The Warning Talk, Pt. 4″
- “The Sign, Pt. 1″
- “The Sign, Pt. 2″
- “The Sign, Pt. 3″
- “The Sign, Pt. 4″
Wonderful to see Axe get some front page love from AMG.
As a huge Axe fan, I have to say that I was not too into this album the first time I heard it. In fact, it took me years to fully appreciate it on its own terms — which is a good point Thom brought up in his review; there is practically nothing else like this album. There are shades of Axelrod’s two previous albums in it, but the chord progressions and the overall development of the tunes is just completely unique. And everything about it feels obsessive and excessively labored over, even when compared to his previous albums. The most interesting thing about it though is that the vocal arrangements are there in place of strings. Song of Innocence and Songs of Experience were both originally intended to be vocal works like Earth Rot ended up as; so you can imagine what those would have sounded like had Axe not substituted strings for vocals. His 2001 self-titled album’s pre-recorded rhythm tracks are all outtakes from the Earth Rot sessions.
Although he would go on to much more dissonant things in the 90’s (especially with Requiem: The Holocaust), I still think that Earth Rot is Axelrod’s most challenging album. And along with the Pride album, I would count this as his most personal work.
~Austin