Son, Ambulance - Someone Else's Deja Vu
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Joe Knapp, the mastermind behind Omaha, Nebraska’s Son, Ambulance, released an album a few years ago called Key. This album hinted at a songwriting genius that was learning how best to deal with the depths of his own talent. Sure, the songs were a little depressing, but it's not news that life is depressing sometimes. And it is the role of the artist to exploit that depression creatively. This is exactly what took place on Key. Well, it’s been a while, but Knapp has gathered up enough songs to give us another Son, Ambulance album. And, it turns out that the time off between albums was not taken in vain as Knapp brings us a new album that not only improves on what was being built on Key, but also shows a little more adventure and ambition. Not only does this new release, somewhat lazily titled Someone Else’s Déjà Vu, give us a glimpse of Knapp at the paragon of his creative powers; it is a chronicling of a man carefully sculpting and crafting his idiom. Always an exciting thing to see in a band or musician or collective or whatever. On first listen, this album feels like it will just be an okay, well-balanced piano-centered album of Midwestern indie music. But, the more you slow down to the album’s pace and deal with it on its own time you slowly start to hear what, for Knapp, is a truly remarkable thing. You start to hear what is actually going on with the album. You start to hear a Son, Ambulance that is not content with just creating easily digestible piano rock. You hear a new Son, Ambulance that has finally become comfortable with its own talent. On prior releases, the major downfall was that you could tell how filthily talented Knapp is not only a pianist, but also a songwriter; however, those albums left you with a sense of incompleteness (a feeling that it is never good to leave your audience with). Someone Else’s Déjà Vu, on the other hand, is a very complete and concerted effort.The key for success on this album: a little bit of ambition and playing outside the box a little. A risky recipe, no doubt, but Knapp pulls it off with precision and style. He proves that in Art, a little ambition goes a long way. Technically speaking, the thing that’s really impressive on this album is the bouncy, harmony-driven bridges that most effectively drive these new songs from meditatively slow to surprisingly ebullient and then back again. All the while the lyrics are poetically expressing some pretty real-life tensions. Each song on the album is so fresh and challenging that it never really lets you just sit there an let it become background music. The majority of the songs on this album seem like they transition three or four times into different songs, but Knapp is just changing it up for us. On any given song you can feel like you should be trotting down a tree-lined Manhattan street in springtime only to stop and be whisked away to Mexico where you are bowing your head for a Latin American dirge in a minor key (as happens when listening to “Quand Tu Marches Seul”). You don’t really know where the song might take you from measure to measure. Luckily, it always takes you to a great, melodic place. The percussion gives the album a truly Latin and sometimes tribal dance feel. It's like Knapp takes straight up Americana and infuses it with a sort of tribal melancholy*. That is, until you get to “Horizons.” This is the point where you start to hear Simon & Garfunkel. Not to worry, though. It isn’t a rip-off that you hear or anything remotely derivative. It seems more like a coincidence that Son, Ambulance sounds a little only-living-boy-in-New-Yorkish that anything that might have been attempted by the band. All praise considered, the album is not without that ostensibly patented Saddle Creek brand of forthright and border-lined mid-puberty era introspective poetry vibe from time to time**. The best example of this is on “Yesterday Morning”***: “This is every letter I never wrote/This is every dream I never told/Every selfish aspiration/Yesterday Morning…”. See?It is important to note that Knapp has a real knack for being as thematic as he can on these songs. This is something new for him and he pulls it off with astonishing success. You see, normally thematic songs run the risk of being a little cheesy. Knapp avoids this by only giving the listener a taste of the thematic elements in songs like “The Renegade” when Latin guitar riffs that usually announce the presence of Antonio Banderas. It doesn’t seem like he only gives a little taste because of any plan or bullshit detector or anything. It seems like he does it because he can’t sit still long enough to see said thematic elements all the way through. Lucky him if...
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