Occasionally you come across an album by an artist and it gives you hope for the future of music. Just when you’ve had your fill of the next great Brooklyn band, or you could go without hearing another electronic folk duo for the next 100 years, along comes an album like Jason Davis’ excellent new long player Flatline Movements. There is no trend being followed. There is no ‘latest craze’ happening. Jason Davis has made an album of fuzzed-out beauty and shattered, dirtied pop eloquence. This is an album for true album lovers. This is an album for the music-starved.
‘Slow Down’ starts out with truncated piano plunks, buzzing bee swarm noise and drum cracks before a Lennon-esque piano line rolls in and Davis sings “when I get time to think about it\I must have been too small\I must have been too tall\to fit square down in the hole”, in a voice that’s part Jon Brion and part Rhett Miller. Within the first thirty seconds of this excellent song you realize you’re hearing an artist who loves the process. He puts great care into every note, every snare hit, every guitar buzz and every little vocal melody. This is not cookie cutter songwriting. ‘Alive’ has a ‘J.Mascis fronting Crazy Horse’ feel to it. Just under two minutes, it’s not too short or too long. ‘Rarely Wrong’ sounds like a Terror Twilight outtake, except with a better rhythm section. And ‘Formative Years’ has a Yo La Tengo upbeat charm to it. A great horn section and head bobbing rhythm makes you want to crank it and sing along. It’s unfair, really, to compare these songs to other artists. Davis does a great job of taking influences and instead of copying or emulating those influences, he turns them into something completely new. In ten years, people will talk of the ‘Jason Davis sound’.
About that ‘sound’: Davis’ music lies in that sonic landscape where beautiful pop melodies are beaten and scarred with buzzing noise and numbing experimentation. Davis not only is an immense songwriter and musician, but he’s also an incredible engineer. Albums like Red Red Meat’s Bunny Gets Paid and Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot are good examples of the sonic footprint left by Jason Davis on Flatline Movements.
There’s no missteps on this album. Songwriting, musicianship, sonic experimentation. This isn’t just a shining moment in the local music scene. This is a shining moment in any music scene. Jason Davis has the innate ability to write and create songs that feel at any moment they could fall apart at the seams. As if they’re a tapestry connected by thin and frayed lines. Bits and pieces strung together in a last ditch effort before all hope is lost. Just as you think the tape will snap off the reel, a note is hit and it all comes together. A drunken fluidity keeps it all going. We may not know where we’re going from one song to the next, but Davis knows exactly what he’s doing and where he’s taking us from start to finish.
Flatline Movements is a ramshackle, hazy pop masterpiece.
Complex Distractions 