Personal Space: Corey Dargel and Matt Marks
Two rising stars of the art song scene and its homebase label New Amsterdam turn pop songs inside out and back to replace the dream with the truth
by Alex V. Cook, Music Editor
first published: June, 2010
first published: June, 2010
It's like rollerskating from straight from Xanadu into the Void.
Corey Dargel
Someone Will Take Care of Me
(New Amsterdam)
Matt
Marks
The Little Death, Vol. 1
(New Amsterdam)
Corey
Dargel's art is a gift. His previous album Other People's Love Songs
were actual gifts, little art songs commissioned as gifts from and to
his friends and admirers. His most recent Someone Will Take Care of Me
is more like the gift of transparency, the delicate exposing of one's
complicated emotions that hopefully will beget some understanding. The
album comprises two discs of such material drawn from his theatrical
pieces Thirteen Near-Death Experiences and Removable Parts
. The former finds him offering frank admissions against a delicate
Calder mobile of winds and strings: I need a constant supply just to
get by ("Twelve Year Old Scotch"), it's not merely an
inflammation under my skin ("Deep Down Inside"), Yes, I've been
hurt/Are you entertained ("Someone Else's Pain") all precise
emotionally as their are musically. It is as if the heart is cracked
open to watch its clock-parts whirl and tick.
The songs on the Removable Parts disc, a succession of parts like "Toes," "Fingers," Brain" and permutations thereof: "Fully Functional" and "Castration," are more dense, closer to the saturation of pop music without necessarily being so. The lyrics unfold into a sing song conversation over magisterial chamber piano like a lover regaling their week; you half-listen to the details absorbing the gist. Like many of the young lions of art song, there is more than a touch of Depeche Mode artier years to his work, delicate arrangements of mild clatter over soundscapes smooth as clotted cream. They seem like a over-complicated way to get to a melody, but perhaps that is the most honest way to convey real love in a song.
Matt
Marks' The Little Death, Vol. 1 is of thicker stuff, described
by the composer as a 'post-Christian nihilist pop opera' but one that
has more in common with Air Supply than it does the Ring. The
"Penetration Overture" is blatantly lush, the kind of sonic situation in
which you'd expect Peter Gabriel to show up any second, but instead the
voices (his and that of Mellissa Hughes) hide among the breeze. These little teenage tone poems to there
being no God do what any great pop aspires to do; conflate the spiritual
with the hormonal, but Marks adds subtle literal touches like samples
of 70's gospel records and the herky-jerky panic of new wave obsessive
love, occasionally ratcheted up to hyper-speed to capture the leaps
between Heaven and the body.
The Little Death does not shy away from the saccharine but isn't above corrupting it as well. "He Touched Me" gets its dreamboat rocked by sudden hip-hop samples, as if to confuse the He's. "I Like Stuff" sounds like an excerpt from the world's worst student musical, an "Everything You Can Do I Can Do Better" riff that should send you running to the exits until it hits you that the litany of likes are all commercials of sorts that culminate in "I like Jesus." The song lays out the crossed purposes of the sacred and the profane to intersect over the will, and the channeling thereof. The Little Death is musical drama for the post-Glee set, using the medium's uplift to tear the fake walls away. It's like rollerskating from straight from Xanadu into the Void.
Photo of Corey Dargel by Samantha West
Alex V. Cook
Music Editor
Alex V. Cook listens to everything and writes about most of it. His latest book, the snappily titled Louisiana Saturday Night: Looking for a Good Time in South Louisiana's Juke Joints, Honky-Tonks, and Dance Halls
about Alex V. Cook »»
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