Jahn Xavier and the Bowerytone’s debut album Yes, You concludes with an apocalyptic blues howler “The Crest”, a shakey, scary reminder of the Chess Blues greats, with Jahn’s saw cutting roar a distilled fury: “Hey, hey, heavy weather on the way. It’s murder by my hand, I say”, he growls. Hurricane Sandy? Or Katrina? Or maybe just a metaphor for every broken promise and lost love. It ends what may stand as Jahn’s signature career achievement decades after the former Richard Hell bassist, former Nitecaps leader, wandered a Lower East Side that ruled the world.
An hour earlier, Jahn had begun the album with a jaundiced, glance backwards: “I remember every struggle,” he warns, “some call them the good old days”. Opening track “I Still Yearn” appears at first listen to be a heavy rock and soul ballad; a burning thing. But when you can get past the burn of his yearn, it appears to be about his stalled musical career: the yearning is for maybe not fame, but for a career that deserved to go further. The song, one of the best of the year, is bitter and needy at the same time and the Bowerytones hefty up. Jahns voice is on the top of the mix and Bowerytones Charlie Roth sinks the dread hard into the mix.
The Bowerytones are a first rate band, if you go onto Soundcloud you can hear an astounding cover of Climax Blues Bands “Couldn’t Get It Right”, a disco groove recorded at the same sessions that didn’t ,ake the album and that doesn’t stop moving. On Yes, You their presence is so central, every song finds a groove, even the ballads, even the rockabilly moves on its stomach. Roth and Denny McDermott make the band shift and move and X plays a lean guitar, the album doesn’t groove, it’s like a pop band. They make their point and they move on.
Between the two songs are eleven slices of dystopia, eleven slices where all the satisfactions are musical because the emotions that fill them are pained. A song about childhood becomes a list of parental neglect, a beautifully melodic classic rock song, ends with a Presley quote about paranoia and suspicion, on a new American standard the girl has already gone.
You can’t turn away from the accumulated bad endings here. Nearly everything lyric is tinged with disaster, everything that can go wrong will go wrong, has gone wrong, as Heidegger put it, “The dreadful has already happened”. This is a grown up, unblinking eye in the storm, a relentless perfect storm of self doubt and self-knowledge and all our punished.
All of which makes Yes, You sound like a downer and it isn’t. Too honest to be optimistic, it gets its optimism from the music. “Walk The Other way” is Tom Petty zoom-y guitar rock and “Jesus DeMilo” is rockabilly fitted to a folkie lyric. The drum is like a locomotive (it sounds like it came off an Old 98’s album) and Jahn’s vocals are positively playful, he sputters like a steam engine, and the song builds to a spectacular guitar solo, so central to the song that Charles Roth had him go back to the studio and pump it up. The lyric is the smartest on an album where they are all smart: “Bless the breath that fuels your sighs. Bless the questions that fire your eyes. Bless the sun that begs you arise. Bless the people that raised you so wise”
If “Jesus De Milo” is rockabilly, “Under The Moon” is waiting for a piano part before being shipped off to Michael Buble, three songs are blues number, a handful are classic rock and a handful more are garage rock. It looks back to Xavier’s musical past only to surpass it moving forward. In other hand’s you might think, hey, it is a nostalgia trip, but there is nothing vaguely elegiac about the album. It uses then but it is about now and now is disappointing on some level, whether it is romantic or career tsumani’s there is a future that simply isn’t there… a helplessness?
Perhaps a helplessness that Yes, You wipes away. Lost careers and destroyed towns are the play things of vengeful gods but the rewardsof art are the gift of gods. However dark, and Yes, You is pitch black, the album belies what the songs are saying. Love may not last but music does, here the past doesn’t feel like an opportunity lost but like a possibility retrieved, a great album can change the past and Yes, You is a great album and it changes Xavier’s past by reveling in its present. So many “shes”, so many opportunities in life can be lost away, but it has only strengthened X’s voice, he sings from the gut, the gorgeous baritone could make the Yellow Pages sound moving, it can sure make these songs throb with pain and power.
It amounts to an old fashioned album, with many different sounding songs, and sharp sad lyrics, that build to an artistic statement about how far Xavier has come and what he has lost on way. But also, what you and and I have lost as well, and what we’ve gained. And it justifies our mistakes and our lives by being so good. We can take pride in his achievement. X said to me: “I honestly don’t care who hears it. My aim was to make a record that my daughter could point to and say ‘that’s what my dad did.’ I’m glad to have accomplished that”. X has indeed accomplished that but he has done something else as well. He has made an album we can all point to and say that’s what Jahn Xavier did.
Yes, You will be released on July 1st, 2013
Grade: A