Album Review: Willis Earl Beal- Nobody Knows
I wonder how hard it is being a tortured
artist.
It seems like it’s really difficult. That the
sheer act of being so god damn tortured is incredibly taxing on said tortured
artist.
From everything I’ve read about
singer/songwriter Willis Earl Beal, he seems kind of like an asshole. Or if not
an asshole, at least a tortured artist that is just doing what is expected of
him—being pretentious and difficult, wanting to be taken seriously as an
artist.
Beal’s back story is probably better known
than his music at this point—he was discovered by XL Records after years of
leaving CD-Rs in coffee shops with his phone number written on them. Call me
and I will sing you a song over the phone, he’d say. He’d leave posters up with
a PO Box in Chicago written on it—write to me and I’ll draw you a picture, he’d
say. Eventually, the music he recorded into a karaoke machine back in 2007 was
given a proper release on last year’s Acoustmatic Sorcery—a rough,
uneven collection that, if nothing else, was a glimpse at the promise of an
incredibly gifted performer.
Beal is back with what can either be looked at
as his first album, or the natural follow up to Acoustmatic Sorcery—Nobody
Knows. While his self-recorded material was built around slightly out
of tune acoustic guitars and ramshackle drum machines, Nobody Knows benefits
from a full band and proper recording equipment—building up the sound that Beal
hinted at with his unhinged, unpredictable live performances.
Beal has always had an amazing voice—that was
apparent on his early home recordings. He’s obviously grown more comfortable
using it though, over the course of his career. There are some staggeringly
powerful moments on Nobody Knows—backed by just some unsettling
ambience, “What’s The Deal?” allows him to let loose and howl as if his life
depended on it.
But with great power comes great
responsibility—on “Ain’t Got No Love,” as well as “Hole in The Roof,” things
get a little out of hand, and the song kind of turns into an excuse for Beal to
just get really, really shouty. “White Noise,” while benefiting from big budget
production, is fairly similar to his early material—sparse, acoustic,
half-rapped at times.
A huge red flag on Nobody Knows is
the album’s pacing—things kind of creep along at a snail’s pace after a certain
point—around the halfway point when “Ain’t Got No Love” peaks, actually. It’s
not like the first half of this album is a party record, or something, but it
certainly has more energy by comparison—both the old-school throwback of
“Coming Through,” and the indie aesthetic of “Burning Bridges” help power the
early parts of this album through.
There are a lot of elements that Beal crams
into his sound—soul and R&B are the most obvious. His penchant for oddball
atmospherics and ragtime-esq piano key plunking assist in almost everything I
read about him drawing some kind of Tom Waits comparison.
Nobody Knows is really the third step in Beal’s musical evolution now
that I think about it—after the home recordings that helped get him a record
deal, he gave away a free, digital EP entitled Principles of a
Protagonist—the soundtrack to an animated short he had made. Principles consists
of a handful of songs from Acousmatic Sorcery, re-imagined and
rerecorded—some of them hint at what Beal has arrived at now. But some of them
just didn’t make any sense—the incredibly somber “Away My Silent Lover” reduced
to the sound of Beal drowning in an ocean of synthesizers, trying to keep time
above all of their patterns and tones.
Willis Earl Beal is a complicated man, and he makes complicated
music. He apparently drank away all the money he made off of Acoustmatic
Sorcery. He’s sick of his back-story, and tired of talking about it in
every interview. According to a profile in The Guardian, he’s “tired of his
face,” so he shows up to photo shoots wearing a mask over his eyes—like in the
piece that Vice did on him.
The music he makes keeps its listeners at an arms length. I don’t
dislike Willis Earl Beal, and I don’t dislike Nobody Knows. I’m
please he’s gotten to finally make the record he had envisioned all along. It’s
a very theatrical record—the mix of style and substance seems a little off to
me, and I found it difficult to connect with it. I feel like part of Beal’s
draw, aside from his compelling back-story, is his ridiculously intense live
show—for a while he was performing by himself with only a reel-to-reel tape player
behind him. Now Beal is backed by a full band, though he does not play an
instrument on stage himself—instead he chooses to flex his biceps and flash his
white teeth, eyes hidden behind a black mask, throwing all of himself into
every performance.
Nobody Knows is the kind of album that runs an interesting
juxtaposition—it’s so daunting at times, it almost seems like you need to break
up listening into small doses; but it’s also the kind of album that benefits
from a start-to-finish listen. It’s dark and imposing, and while certainly it
will be critically lauded, because it is so stand off-ish, it is the kind of
record I’m uncertain as to how often I will be going back to for subsequent
listens. I wonder if people are so quick to praise Beal because his origin tale
is so incredible, or if I’m just missing something that everybody elese is
hearing.