Chuck Prophet
Age of Miracles
New West Records
By Marianne Ebertowski
 Chuck
Prophet has come a long way from his "paisley underground"
years as a lead guitarist for Green On Red with whom he recorded
eight albums. Age of Miracles is his seventh solo effort
and the musical territory Prophet explores here has, again, widened
from the country/rock area he hailed from since his musical beginnings
to soul, funk, hip-hop and industrial noise. Prophet as the producer
of the album, the main guitar player and the singer and songwriter
could not have put his signature down more clearly, but co-producer
Eric Drew Feldman (Captain Beefheart, Frank Black, PJ Harvey)
has certainly not just been another fiddler on the knobs. He
helped to drag Prophet out of a creational and inspirational
impasse and added some crucial sounds on his Moog synthesizer
on a couple of tracks.
The general mood on Age of Miracles shows a certain
gloomy likeness to Static Transmission, the 2003 album
of another ex-paisley undergrounder, Steve Wynn (The Dream
Syndicate). Both musicians have matured into independent, individualist
musicians who almost never do what you expect them to do. With
this release, Chuck Prophet continues the path he has chosen
with The Hurting Business (2000) and No Other Love
(2002), at the same time carefully trying to avoid repeating
himself. The outcome is an album that is hard to fall in love
with immediately, but that if you continue to play it nevertheless,
suddenly seems to creep up behind you and hit you over the head
with all its might and nastiness. This effect has a lot to do
with the arrangement and the production that are "subliminally
mean" rather than straightforward: something evil is hiding
under the surface and you can't smell it right away.
The same is true for the lyrics.
Sometimes I feel so alive/ I wish I was dead, Prophet
growls in the opener "Automatic Blues" against a backdrop
of blazing horns. There is something terrifying in the air, something
that you feel listening to Iggy Pop's The Idiot or Lou
Reed's Berlin.
Lou Reed's presence is hovering throughout whole album including
the title track, a sluggishly moving song with heavy string arrangement
(Jason Borger) and female backing vocals (provided by Prophet's
wife Stephanie Finch):
The night is gonna crush the day
Once it was the other way
We hope that you enjoy your stay
In the age of miracles.
Prophet is accompanied on pedal steel in "The Smallest
Man in the World" and it sounds good, but it's a song with
a weird lyrical twist underlined by Feldman's piano playing that
seems to quote from Newman's "Little People"
know what I mean? "Whatever he does, he's the
smallest man in the world" and that is not good news.
"Just to See You Smile" continues in the Lou Reed
groove, but this time with an almost Phil Spector-like orchestration
complete with booming bass, glockenspiel and a whole girl choir.
Prophet immediately wipes the smile off any listener's face with
"West Memphis Moon," the tragic story of the West Memphis
Three, three young men who were convicted for murder of three
boys in 1994, one of them sentenced to death, even though the
evidence was, to say the least, questionable.
There's a melancholy country feel about "You've Got Me
Where you Want Me," a duet with Stephanie Finch co-written
by Kim Richey. Richey also contributed to "Baby Pin a Rose
on Me," which turns out to be about an abusive relationship:
You saw a light
I saw a freight train coming
I tried to tell you he was no damn good
You heard bells, I heard the hammer falling.
He ran you down like I said he would.
"A man's strength is on the insidebut you better
be careful with this stuff," Prophet warns in "Heavy
Duty," a weird and frightening song (co-written with D.
(Dan?) Penn), that sounds like Depeche Mode in their darkest
period battling it out with Doug Sahm.
The closer "Solid Gold" (again featuring Stephanie
Finch on vocals) is another song reminiscent of Lou Reed's Berlin-period,
with a very soulful, delicate string arrangement.
I wanna raise a toast to everyone
to my friends near and far
I wanna raise a toast to stand up men
Wherever you are
I wanna raise a toast to you my love
For putting up a fight
Then I'm gonna raise my glass again, for you and you alone
on this star- crossed night.
I drink to that. Not every song on Age of Miracles
is equally convincing, but it is an album that will make you
feel as if you have just been crushed by a truck. That's not
a feeling you want to have every day, but sometimes it helps
to make you enjoy every day life a little bit more.
www.chuckprophet.com
www.newwestrecords.com
www.sonicrendezvous.com (Europe)
Contact Marianne Ebertowski at ebertowski-at-rockzilla.net
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