Archer Prewitt - 'Wilderness' (Thrill Jockey)
2/5
By: Thomas Hannan
Stewart Lee - 'The idea that you should not judge a book by its cover is offensive to graphic designers who spend hours moving images around on their computers to satisfy the idiot whims of marketing men trying to sell things they have not read to people they have nothing but contempt for. So, you should judge a book by its cover.'
Stewart Lee is a funny man and he has a point. Why give something a cover if it's not meant to mean anything? Obviously, 'Wilderness' isn't a book (unless we've been grossly misinformed as to the definitions of such things), but bloody hell, go with us for a minute here. There are only two types of records that put bare breasts on the cover. One - you're Cradle of Filth, putting topless nuns on crucifixes and splattering them with (hopefully) fake blood. You're going to rock - blasphemously. Two - you're Archer Prewitt, the drawing is a soft pencil image of some sultry maiden who doesn't actually need to be putting the goods on-show but does so to prove that it's very much the mind of the lass that we're concerned with here, the inner workings of the tragedy of the raw human condition, not mere, um, titillation. We deduce there's probably an acoustic guitar on it somewhere.
All that and we didn't read the blurb, let alone push play. And without being smug, it was pretty accurate, too. Prewitt, more famed for his involvement in The Sea & Cake, is a master of all things introverted. 'Wilderness' is sublimely instrumented, strings, keys brass and a suspiciously large number of further toys are so subtly arranged that your memory of the record will still be of one that's a distinctly quiet, solo affair, even if Prewitt is very rarely to be found with solely his six-string for company.
There is a bizarre dedication to a low volume (honestly, turning this thing up doesn't actually make it any louder) and a set of instruments that technically don't require the plugging of one thing into any other thing to make a sound, leading you to wonder whether they're trying not to wake up a sleeping infant next door, or if they are, in fact, all Amish. There is, however, a nice, if slight, variation to the mood as the album progresses, from the delightful sparkle of the opening 'Way Of The Sun' or 'Cheap Rhyme', the loudest, happiest, and subsequently best thing here (the brass parts that sound like sunshine), to the much less arresting, morose wander of 'O, Lord', you'll be led through emotions without being shown their peaks and depths, but rather a hazy picture of their constant co-dependency.
Now, is that just a very long-winded way of stating that what with all this reluctance to ever really get too elated or indeed angry on us that 'Wilderness' is essentially a middle of the road record? Yes, we have been scuppered. Or rather, Mr. Prewitt has. There's a lot of markedly pleasurable material here, but sitting through it all becomes much too rapidly tiresome, the lack of dynamic shift means the often all too lengthy tracks blur together where true beauty of this kind captures the attention much more consistently. Things such as 'Leaders' drift by virtuously unnoticed, the self-deprecation of 'Without You' too not providing any feelings stronger than apathy.
Heartless people could find it easy to hate, but you'd have to be quite that bitter to want to, and there really aren't that many of them around. But only the really big of heart will have room left to love a record quite so average, and whilst there are more of them around than the bitter kind, it still won't be enough to elevate the status of the infinitely pleasant but all too forgettable 'Wilderness' from being any more life-affirming than a nice warm bath.
Artists in this article: Archer Prewitt
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