James Jackson Toth - Waiting In Vain
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
James Jackson Toth - Beulah The Good
Waiting In Vain , the new album by James Jackson Toth, turns out to be aptly, unfortunately titled. Intriguing on many levels but ultimately disappointing, the disc is brimming with metaphorical lyrics, subtle and wonderful instrumental performances, and Toth’s mostly pleasant and occasionally twang-tinged vocals. On the strong opener “Nothing Hides,” Toth sings hauntingly over an adaptation of a bluesy shuffle groove, with gorgeous female vocal accompaniment giving subtle support.
The album proceeds with a similarly mellow tone but rarely duplicates the something-bubbling-just-beneath-the-surface anticipation of its opener. There is lots of wonderful music that succeeds without the “catchy hooks” that people—reviewers and publicists anyway—love to attach to songs, but songs like “Poison Oak” and “Doreen” barely have something that qualifies as a chorus, and there is only so much that background vocals and well-timed guitar and keyboard punctuations can do—a case of lipstick on a pig, one might say, but the old aphorism is a bit too harsh here and particularly dangerous in our current political climate. Even the beautiful, swaying “Midnight Watchmen” lacks much dynamic contour and ends up feeling like listening to a thirty-second clip of a beautiful song on repeat.
Waiting in Vain is at its best when Toth loosens up and has some fun on tunes like “Becoming Faust” and “The Park,” the latter a clattering tune where Toth’s voice has flecks of David Berman from Toth’s current touring partners the Silver Jews. But while Berman’s quirky lyrics stick out like cutely deformed thumbs in his songs, Toth tends to get weighed down in a clutter of metaphors (“I’m the blood on your sawdust floor,” “the holster in my head”) that makes his mentions of love and booze seem like afterthoughts to retain some connection to Toth’s musical southern roots. Put it like this: when Johnny Cash and the Grateful Dead sing about poker, they didn’t couch those topics, as Toth does, in phrases like “creation holds all the aces.”
Near the end of the album, Toth suddenly and inexplicably takes a page from the Mick Jagger School of Pronunciation on “My Paint,” which if spelled phonetically would be called something like “Ma Pient.” It’s not a huge detail, but it’s emblematic of an album that pulls from a lot of sources but doesn’t hold on to any tight enough to draw out their best qualities.
