DanielSonenberg.com

In 2003 Matt Schickele quietly home released the CD April November and then retired from music. He got a job in the solar energy field, closed up his guitar case, and slipped into oblivion. April November failed to elicit interest from even the minor-est of labels (after Schickele’s previous efforts had been picked up by Feldspar and Southern Records), so he home pressed the disk…if you asked him to. This narrative – played out ten thousand times across the globe in the shadow of the callous Industry – would have no special interest if the disk in question were not a work of genius. A fusion of Brian Wilson-inspired production (replete with melodeon, melotron, Theremin, backwards effects, and a host of even stranger sonic treats), some low-fi cred (the second half, “November,” is home recorded), and Schickele’s soulful, now smooth now scratchy voice, the album clearly identifies him as a student of the late sixties. Yet instead of devolving into pastiche (like, say, George Harrison’s “When we was fab,” or the infectious but ultimately monotonous music of the Shins), April November absorbs the lessons of the great studio masterminds of the Love era (Wilson and Martin, of course) and thoroughly digests them into the fluids and enzymes of Schickele’s unmistakable personal style. The ostentatious production is so thoroughly musical that at times it is in itself heartbreaking (listen to the squishing water sounds that eventually drown the song “April” and note the unexpected activation of your tear ducts), and the double tracked vocals, dissonantly tinged cascading harmonies, and meticulously composed and arranged instrumental breaks work in concert to support and even become part of what is unquestionably the album’s strongest suit, its songwriting. Tunes like “Don’t Need a Reason,” “Last Day Night,” and “Weird Luck Charm” (as close to Kurt Weill as Schickele will ever come) from the April half of the album burn themselves into your consciousness and haunt your dreams. Which is why its surprising that in fact, the very best songwriting is saved for the six songs that make up the homemade November. This amalgam of innovation, melody, bold form, and devil-may-care looseness is unlikely to be equaled any time soon by Schickele or anyone else. Even Schickele seems aware of the strength of this material in the context of the album, inserting the charming piano piece “The Moon’s on Fire” as a kind of breather before unloading a final song, “Guided,” that is as secularly spiritual, as uplifting and crushing, as transformational and modest as any song I’ve heard. It is his “Day in the Life” to close out his Sgt. Pepper, the punctuation mark at the end of a recording career, stabbed into posterity as the last aching glimpse of what might have been in the alternate world where all artistry reaps its just rewards and adoring fans of intelligent music are not routinely cast to sea.

This story, it seems, has a happy ending. At least a happy continuation. Schickele’s retirement didn’t stick (a great loss to the world of solar energy, no doubt). He was lured back into action when a group of friends began monthly bluegrass jam sessions at the M Shanghai Bistro and Den in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Slowly, this raucous and unseemly collection of banjo-, mandolin-, guitar-, ukulele-, spoon-, saw-, fiddle- and harmonica-playing misfits emerged as the M Shanghai String Band, and after one self-released CD they were signed to Red Parlor, a newish outfit based in Cold Springs, New York. The new release, From The Air, is now available, and will be reviewed in this space some time soon. Schickele is a part time songwriter for the group, alongside the seemingly more prolific Austin Hughes (formerly of Very Pleasant Neighbor). Most importantly, bit by bit, wedged between the monthly (and now more like weekly) gigs of the string band, Schickele has started playing out again as a solo artist. Now, four years after he checked out with April November, he quietly offers Lion Air, a new album.

Lion Air is a stark, short, introverted work. At 26.5 minutes in length, housed in rather nondescript packaging, and featuring only a single acoustic guitar and voice (no harmonies), the album is on the surface unambitious, and almost hopelessly uncommercial. After a full listen to April November (unquestionably the place for you to start if you are a Schickele virgin) you will find yourself wondering why this man is not world famous. Lion Air is unlikely to take hold of you in such away on first listen, and yet it is no small accomplishment. What this album brings to mind perhaps most of all for me is the naturalistic ideology of the Dogma 95 filmmakers led by Lars von Trier. In 1995 they announced a new doctrine, enumerated in specific rules that eschewed special effects, studio production, props and superficiality and artifice of all stripes. Schickele has always been one to avoid even the slightest vocal reverb, and if he has ever employed the digital pitch correction that is nearly ubiquitous in studio recording nowadays he has covered his tracks exceedingly well. Even still, April November was rich with artifice in the best sense of the word, an unending litany of daring studio effects and Production with a capital P. On Lion Air these dressings have been cast aside and there is no place for Schickele to hide. Every string buzz, every vocal crack is left in tact. Song fades are cut off abruptly, words are occasionally swallowed. It sounds like Matt Schickele in his bedroom, singing his songs for no particular audience, occasionally amusing himself, occasionally wistful, sad, silly, mournful. Every performance reads like a first take, in all its freshness and imperfection. If April November was his Sgt. Pepper, to carry that rather inappropriate comparison just a little further, this is his Plastic Ono Band.

With all the accoutrements gone, it is perhaps more possible to hear what a great guitarist Schickele is here than on any previous recording. On a new Martin steel string (the last several CDs featured predominantly nylon string guitar) Schickele’s playing is as sharp and clear as it’s ever been. He has always avoided empty virtuosity, favoring a carefully arranged, dense and dissonant chordal unfolding to a lightning linear cock solo any day of the week, and here that trend continues. But he plays with such precision on Lion Air, and offers so much intricate counterpoint, so much syncopation, seems so deeply in control of every string of the instrument, that the guitar emerges as at least an equal partner in the production, if not the protagonist. This emergence reaches its logical conclusion in the instrumental “Seems Like It’s Time,” an alternately jazzy and folk-like composition that precedes the album’s final track, “Like Us All.” In “Fear All Gravity,” a song that is right at home on this album although I saw Schickele perform it almost twenty years ago, muted and steadily repeated half-chords in the low register of the guitar are disrupted by cathartic jangling interjections that fully realize the potential of Schickele’s new choice of instrument.

The songwriting, which always seems to be Schickele’s principal concern, is sharp and focused on Lion Air. I’m not sure that the album contains classics akin to “Guided,” “Don’t Need a Reason,” “Sweet Anonimity,” “Changeling,” or “Last Day Night,” but no-one should have to live up to such a standard. Indeed the songs on Lion Air are possibly as good, but not as straightforwardly melodic, not as catchy. This can be a plus, as often, the Schickele songs that are least catchy have the most to offer on repeated listenings. The precedent here is not to be found on the extroverted April November, but instead on its predecessor, Cities Filled With Lights, where the subdued, all-acoustic title track quietly co-existed with sparkling grabbers like “Split the Clouds” and “Enemies like Enemies,” and has nonetheless held up with the best of them. Indeed, Lion Air is a CD filled with songs like “Cities Filled With Lights,” although by and large they tend to be more upbeat (less upbeat would be hard). Schickele of late has assumed something of a wistful, nostalgic tone, never in a cloying way, but even at his happiest he sounds somewhat sad. On the opening track, “Ease on it,” he repeatedly sings “Ease on it, can’t take it all on,” in his mellifluous rasp, an instrument informed by the spirit if not the style of the blues. It is a refrain that summarizes the maturity that has crept into what we can only hope is mid-period Schickele, an accepting posture of one that has learned to harness the fire and frustration of deepest youth. This theme is made explicit in one of the album’s best songs, “At a Party,” which I’ll quote at length:

at a party, really don’t belong
trying to pack it up for home

somehow end up quieting this kid
she’s dropped more than she can lift

ask what’s up, what’s going on in there
said the strangest thing to hear

‘the earth is gone, water went ahead
fire wouldn’t come, and the wind is dead’

smile and shrug, try not to say ‘you’re young’
instead say ‘nice poem.’

I don’t miss youth, the loneliness and shyness
but then sometimes I’m surprised

That song, perhaps the hardest rocker on this all-acoustic collection – with the girl’s strange poem delivered with intensity in Schickele’s burning, crackling tenor – is followed by a charming throwaway, “Can I Have a Girlfriend,” a bouncy children’s song that demonstrates Schickele’s not taking himself at all too seriously these days.

The album’s title comes from the final song, a soulful track on which Schickele integrates a syncopated bass line with an intense repeated note riff on the upper guitar, offering a poetic homage to his departed uncle, David Schickele:

come by and see me promise, I won’t forget
the lion-air surrounding him, the movements that he made
intensity of real living, he had a gift
wide-open gestures, eyes that glowed, and glowing still in death

and like us all he dreams

The bluesiest song – and Schickele is never really particularly bluesy, is “It’s all very lovely.” On it, he establishes a kind of down home ostinato, delivered with balls. But, never content (as frightfully too many are) to build an entire song on a vamp, Schickele moves on to a surprise chorus, punctuated by a new, more dynamic riff in a different key setting the words “don’t be afraid of the night time.” The nighttime here, a time of ghosts, is cast as something wonderful and new, and each time it arrives – the section of the song, that is – I feel I’m hearing it for the first time.

Schickele’s voice on the album is not at its smoothest, and his annunciation, as I’ve noted, is very occasionally garbled. But ultimately these potential flaws do not project as such. The effect, instead, is of an artist laying himself bare, understanding that at the end of the day his limitations are the core of his style. Lion Air is not Schickele’s best CD (if you’ve read this far you know who gets that honor), but it is unquestionably his most honest, and as a result, his most courageous. He has arrived at a place musically where he is content to be nothing other than himself, and to share his private music with a public that, if limited in scope, has simply got to be unparalleled in hunger. That this release goes down as a pin dropping on pavement, lost amidst the endless noisy comings and goings of lesser but more famous men and women, is to be lamented. But such laments can gain no traction in the face of the far happier news that Matt Schickele is making music again, and has released another recording of exceptional quality.