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 Caught in the Carousel "There will be music despite everything"
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Justin Currie
The Great War
Ryko
Justin Currie's second solo album is a rousing polemic about the many thrills and heartbreaks that the battle of loving someone yields. But along the way, Currie also insightfully suggests that The Great War of love is as much a battle of the self as it is a battle with someone else. In other words, it's hard enough to be a person, but it's even harder to be a person with someone else in the room. A relationship is both a thing of great beauty and a thing of deep consternation and to live between these two can be a tricky proposition. Autonomy, individuality and the preservation of identity are always points of contention and although it may be tempting to want to chuck the whole thing because that trio may feel underfed or operating at a deficit, sometimes we leave too soon while other times we stay too long. Either way, there's always work to be done.
"The lovers of the world are slaving away," sings Currie on The Great War's jangling and impossibly catchy opener "A Man With Nothing To Do," a song about viewing love from the safety of the sidelines. In spite of this shelter from the storm of romance and all its entanglements, Currie suggests that a man who does "nothing much but breathe" may be staying out of it, but he's also "passing the time by letting time pass over me." In other words, he's wasting it. Unlike Henry James' John Marcher, of whom the author reported, "No passion had ever touched him…he had survived and maundered and pined, but where had been his deep ravage?" Currie is up for the ravaging and in the song's memorable chorus he admits that he's longing to be a part of the romantic scrum: "Here I am/Waiting for you/A man with nothing to do."
Although all of this may echo Michael Stipe's dark admission that the object of his affection in R.E.M.'s "The One I Love" is nothing more than a "simple prop to occupy my time," Currie sees a relationship as more than petty amusement and wisely prescribes love to avoid emotional inertia. He knows it can be a tangled web of wires, but he also knows the toil to untangle is better than no toil at all.
And there is toil to report. In the rueful funk of "Anywhere I'm Away From You," Currie warns his partner that their coupling is as much of a refuge as a roofless house in a rainstorm. Offering a spin on the sobriety of the sentiment that home is where the heart is, he offers instead that home is where the heart used to be, declaring, "Home is anywhere/Anywhere I'm away from you." The buoyant and soulful pop of "As Long As You Don't Come Back" is "Anywhere's" near twin in sentiment: "I won't feel alone/As long as you don't come back."
"At Home Inside Of Me" is a tuneful and melodious description of the ingredients of one's inner strength ("Armies of children and ghosts of suffragettes/Make merry in the cauldron of my chest") and in the process Currie declares himself to be the host of a history of violence, uprising and a dark, scrappy strength ("Bodies dumped in ditches/And stowaways at sea/They make themselves a home inside of me"). But more than that, the song is a weapon-checking headcount where Currie lays his arms on the table as if to say, "This is what I'm made of."
On "Ready To Be," in a cascading croon Currie sings ironically to his partner that he's probably as bad as everyone says he is ("A good man's just a great disguise") and maybe even worse. When he taunts, "And your friends who say I'm bad/Why don't you tell them all you've been had/Why don't you tell them what I am is what they see," his sarcasm suggests a brewing bitterness that has finally spilled over. Meanwhile, the sunny pop of "Can't Let Go Of Her Now" melodically catalogs Currie's many complaints ("She makes my confidence/Come out like self-defense/She breaks my patience like a match") but in spite of this litany, the song's twist comes in an unexpected lyrical disclosure: "Just don't tell her I would die/If I let her slip away." Elsewhere, the eight-minute "The Fight To Be Human" is jaw-droppingly good and comes with confession, repentance and brutal self-examination. In it, Currie dubs himself "the governor of my empty domains." Suitably, only one with such a title can confidently utter the refrain, "I hate the world they gave me."
Currie is a specialist of the spare and gripping ballad and the stunning "You'll Always Walk Alone" along with the lustrous, string-laden elegance of "The Way That It Falls" rank with some of his best work. On the latter, which is lush and exquisite, Currie confesses against a sweeping arrangement of cellos and violins, "I love the night/The spills and squalls…" Addressing the ephemeral nature of love and the curse of mortality, Currie maintains on "You'll Always Walk Alone" that there's no bond that can keep people together forever: "Arm in arm and hand in hand/Tied together with a wedding band/Tethered to the line between the phones/Remember you'll always walk alone." In other words, nobody's safe from an inevitable perishing fate, even the wiseguy who's "swooning at the sinking sun/With that special girl you string along." It's as much a cautionary tale as it is a reminder of corporeal impermanence and the song's title echoes a sentiment Currie first uttered on "Nothing Ever Happens" from his old band Del Amitri's Waking Hours: "We'll all be lonely tonight and lonely tomorrow."
From "Nothing Ever Happens" to Twisted's "Driving With The Brakes On" nobody ends an album like Justin Currie and The Great War's rhapsodic "Baby, You Survived" is no exception. The perfect song to finish this riveting song cycle, "Baby" comes with piano and strings and a palpable sense of emotional relief. "At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet," Plato once said, which explains wondrous couplets like, "And her shadow disappears/When you shine a light down the years/And torch that hallway of souvenirs." A long way from "A Man With Nothing To Do's" mere interest in romance, "Baby, You Survived" captures a man in the grip of love and feeling pretty damn good about it, thank you very much. Turning his gaze inward, Currie sings, "So lately you and I/Have spoken of marrying/So it's time to say goodbye/To that bag of broken things you're carrying/'Cause This time you can't hide/All you can do is trust her loving side/And walk on down the aisle with a smile and her voice inside..."
There are very few singers around as literate, intelligent and immensely capable as Justin Currie and on The Great War he glissades seamlessly from rocker to ballad, from righteousness to longing, from isolation to desire and from despair to devotion. As a singer/songwriter, Currie is in a master class and this album is a skillfully realized meditation on love that's crafted with finesse, erudition and soul. It's a work of tremendous and spellbinding beauty.
&$151;Alex Green
CITC talks to Justin Currie about The Great War:
Caught In The Carousel: How long was the gestation period in terms of the songwriting process? Did the songs all come at once?
Justin Currie: Two batches, mostly. I wrote a bunch of things in the autumn of 2008 (most songwriters tell me they are most productive in spring and fall) and then went ahead and tracked them in February last year. After that I waited until the following autumn to find the last few things. "A Man With Nothing To Do" and "The Fight To Be Human" are from that last batch. "Everyone I Love" is from eons ago - the tail end of the Del Amitri period.
CITC: You cover every facet of love here--and yet, it remains an elusive, almost vaporous thing. What is the most confounding thing about it for you?
JC: Well, what the fuck is it? It's not an emotion, it's not a state of mind or a philosophy. It seems to be some infernal biological imperative: find love, get love, love someone, be loved. Nobody can control it. It appears out of nowhere like a meteor or a ghost. It stops when you least expect like a power cut. It drives men and women insane. Without it children basically die. Too much of it turns people into maniacs - given or received.Scientists keep poking around in the human brain looking for it. One day they'll find it. It'll be a little one-eyed dog, wagging its tail and howling for more.
CITC: Plato says that love turns a man into a poet--do you agree?
JC: Ah, Plato - what a card! I'd like to suggest that the lack of it might do the same but I'd probably be wrong. I think there is a perceptible coldness in the heart of great poets - a beady and callous eye cast over the multitude. Allied to an instinctive empathy, sure, but I suspect poets are aliens. How can they nail such precise feelings so common to us all with mere words on paper?
CITC: The lovers of the world, as you say, are indeed slaving away--is a harmonious relationship as much work as its opposite?
JC: Do I look like a therapist? (Don't answer that.) I have only had two harmonious relationships and they both hit a strange wall of mutual disenchantment. Lord knows why. They certainly involved no work that I can recall. But perhaps that is youth. I don't know about any of these things. I do know that as soon as you think you have found a governing principle that you can use to make sense of things you'll soon be disabused. What happens in the heart is invisible to the waking mind. Confusion reigns and passions make men mad.
CITC: You're the king of the perfect album closer and true to form, no song could have better ended this than "Baby, You Survived." What was your intention with punctuating The Great War with this one?
JC: As I was writing The Great War I noticed a vague theme of family cropping up here and there. There was a song about my sisters and one about my parents, neither of which made the finished cut. "Baby, You Survived" made it but it was always going to have to be at the end. I like that though it's all slightly tragic it finishes on a positive. It's a kind of congratulation to the diligent listener who has made it to the end. Well done! Now start again- but this time drink heavily...
The Great War is out now. Get it.
Internet:
Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/justincurrie
http://www.rykodisc.com/justincurrie/thegreatwar
—Alex Green
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