Busy Being Born

Lifting Me Higher and Higher...

     

For me this is Gary Lucas' album masterpiece. Skeleton at the Feast, with its hard-edged flocks of feedback notes and whirling dervish delays that let Lucas become his own orchestra, is very close behind. But Here Lucas' touch is unerring---both his touch on the strings and frets of his chosen instrument (or, perhaps more accurately, his chosen material language) and in his choice of material and the tone he assigns each piece. At age 6, my daughter was trying to sing along with the Hebrew "Jewish fight song" Adon Olom, caught by its simultaneous go-for-broke catchiness and spooky undertow. One of the trickiest things for an artist to do "these days" is to present straight forward emotionalism without embarrassment or distracting flakes of corn. If Lucas' shimmering arrangement of "Sunrise, Sunset"---one so personal we can hear the whorls of his fingerprints as he coaxes the notes into the shapes he desires---if this doesn't swell your heart your ventricles are in need of a coffin. "Theme from Exodus" is nearly as good . . . but Lucas is also an adept in the mysteries of aural psychology, and in "Abie the Fishman" (the title from a bit in an old Marx Brothers movie) the self-immolation of denying one's identity bursts into atonal flame and crashes against our ears like the sound of Robert Johnson's hail falling on the denizens of Gomorrah. And, heck, some of the pieces here ("The Mensch in the Moon" and "A Hundred Pounds of Clay," for example) are downright funny as well! I know of no album I would, or could, recommend more highly. It lifts me higher and higher with each listening.