Flying Change
(Scarlet Shame)
Bittersweet and lovely, New York songwriter Sam Jacobs' Pain is a Reliable Signal wanders through desolate hospital waiting lounges, x-ray labs and hotel rooms in its consideration of love, illness and mortality. The album was inspired by a series of events that began in 2004, when Jacobs' wife Erica began experiencing extreme sciatic nerve pain. Surgeries and consultations followed, at Georgetown and the Mayo Clinic, but the pain continued.
Jacobs' album, his third under the Flying Change name, is by turns defiant and exhausted, jittery and delicately accepting, its restrained but carefully considered arrangements wrapped around shards of surrealistic shards of lyricism. His voice seems nearly always on the verge of a sigh, a bit like Bill Callahan's in its dark resignation. Yet the songs are in no way depressing, but rather subtly triumphant, with bits of pizzicato violin, piano and glockenspiel lighting up the gloom.
Jacobs has drawn together a fine assembly of jazz and pop musicians to accompany him - pianist Matt Ray, bluegrass and jazz violinist Antoine Silverman, Black Crowes drummer Bill Dobrow, sometime Radiohead saxophonist Stan Harrison and trombonist Dan Levine of They Might be Giants. Songwriter Paul Brill, who runs the Scarlet Shame label, took a hand in recording and producing, and a couple of tracks, the gypsy stomp of "The Ways We Destroy Each Other", the glitch-y electro-pop of "Don't Look Away" particularly bear his imprint.
Strong supporting musicians, full but never overwhelming arrangements give this album its buoyancy, the upward lift that keeps Jacobs' songs from melodrama. Consider, for instance, "Mayo Clinic," with its sweeping, vaguely Celtic flourishes of violin, its dense drones of accordion (that's Rob Burger, who has played with Iron and Wine and Lucinda Williams). The show belongs to Jacobs. The focus never really wavers from his soft rueful voice murmuring elliptical verses about doubt and pain. And yet there is a dizzying triumph in Silverman's violin solo near the end, as if music could supply what medicine cannot, a way to overcome personal suffering.
There's a good bit of variety in Pain Is a Reliable Signal, the shout-along upbeat-ness of "If You See Something, Say Something," the bare piano, string bass and drum arrangement of "Hold My Heartache", the Beatles-psych guitar distortion of "St. Mary's." Many of these songs, even the faster, more optimistic ones, embed stark, striking images from hospital life into their fabric. And yet, you come away with the notion that this record is not really about illness and suffering, but rather about the human connection that transcends it. Over the blistering, sun-stroked electric distortion of "St. Mary's", Jacobs sings "This is a love letter," over and over. And indeed, Pain Is a Reliable Signal is about love as much as it's about mortality. Don't let the sad story scare you off. This is a very fine album, deeply felt, beautifully put together and life affirming.
Standout Tracks: "Mayo Clinic," "If You See Something Say Something" JENNIFER KELLY
