"Buy the thing that makes you happy/ Buy the thing that gets you high/ Pack
your worries in a suitcase/ Send them off and say goodbye," is how Kelley
Stoltz's way-beyond-excellent third album begins, and this happy-go-lucky
sentiment, swathed in jittery piano and old-time, vibrato-laced, medicine-show singing, is both a statement of philosophy and an
advertisement. Coming out at the height of seasonal affective disorder
season, Below the Branches is everything you need to keep winter's
crushing dullness at bay — a Prozac-laced musical brownie for cold mornings
and darkening afternoons. A giant step up from last year's EP Sun Comes
Through (with which it shares one track), this new full-length is a
clearer, more cohesive realization of Stoltz's art than either Antique
Glow or The Past Was Faster, and both of those were
near-classics. It is quite possibly Stoltz's best work ever, and certainly
one of the landmark releases of 2006.
Stoltz draws from the same set of influences as on previous
albums: The Beatles, the Beach Boys, Nick Drake, Syd Barrett and countless
Nuggets-era three-chorders. Yet he seems more in control of those
influences this time out, more able to filter them through his own distinct
perspective. For example, while "Ever Coming Back" starts out with
unmistakable homage to Brian Wilson, it diverges almost immediately into
the kind of jaunty, fuzzy, garage anthem we've come to expect from Stoltz.
Pianos figure prominently in the album art, both on the cover and on the
disc itself, suggesting that Below the Branches was conceived
primarily on the ivories. That's not a limiting factor exactly, since
Stoltz coaxes a great deal of variety out of this single instrument. For
instance, there's a tranquil piano line in "Words," the song that contains
the title, that is cool and refreshing as running water as it runs
through the lovely melody. Later on, in "Sun Comes Through," the keyboards
turn raucous, banging out barroom chords and scale progressions. With
"Winter Girl," minor chords, widely spaced, frame Stoltz's fragile song at
its beginning and end, giving an old-fashioned resonance to sweetly
plaintive lyrics like "Oh, it's awfully cold, it's gotten awfully cold
here/ And oh, if the truth be told, you've got a snowflake on your cheek,
dear." And with "Prank Calls," the piano's trills and flourishes would
sound right at home in a Western saloon as the gunslinger makes his entrance.
These songs are not all piano ballads. There's some wonderful slide guitar
at the beginning of "Birdies Singing," leading into a driving yet somehow
trance-inducing garage beat. Sean Coleman plays electric here, and on
several other tracks, kicking in those pinging reverberating notes that
give this hard-rocking track an appealing weirdness. This cut is followed
by the excellent "Rabbit Hugged the Hound," with its dreamy harmonies and
giddily utopian lyrics, one of the highlights of the disc. Then it's on to
"Sun Comes Through," from last year's EP, sounding fuller and more stately
and eccentric than ever.
The CD closes exquisitely, with the minimal but beautiful "No World But
This World," all picked guitars and sweet wavery vocals. Like the rest of
the album, the track is centered on the here and now, accepting the world
for all its flaws and celebrating it. "Ain't no world like the world we've
got here/ Ain't no place I'd rather go/ Ain't nowhere I'd rather be dear/ I
close my eyes and I'm home," Stoltz sings, and you have to agree, this is
pretty good, right here and now.
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