DAVID KARSTEN
DANIELS – sharp teeth
(CD/digital, Fat Cat)
„There is a joy you can’t
contain / there is a feeling you just can’t explain“. Oh yes, the beauty
of fully arranged, harmonic folk-songs somewhere in the vast areas between
Tim Buckley and Will
Oldham, between Gram Parsons and Elvis Costello and Jason Molina
- which is not meant to describe the music, but only to flag down the
continent in which this collection of songs operates. A vast open and wide
continent indeed, leaving so much open and to be explored. So much actually,
that you’d be ready to include Neil Diamond into the orbit as well.
Uninhibited beauty and ferocious bittersweetness, a dozen or so decades of
wonderful music and you’ll know that David Karsten Daniels is open to
almost anything when the jazzband starts up in the middle of „scripts“,
the second song of „sharp teeth“. Or when that sharp electric guitar
takes over on „American Pasttime“, track three, and is suddenly shut off
only to fall onto a hundred year old folk-songwriting on the next song. This
expanding of his music into all directions is something you’ve probably
been missing by all the laudated (and mostly rightfully so)
singer-songwriters of late, when they were searching for the core of their
style by confining them to a very certain, special section of possibilities.
Sharpening their skills by sharpening the points and their focus, but here
Daniels tries for the opposite way: blowing up arrangements, adding and
adding and adding without ever becoming superflous or overdone or hyperbolic
because he has a magic hand for what fits.
Even though this is David Karsten
Daniels debut solo album, he has a lot of history and experience to show,
from hymn-singing and the school jazz band, to formal composition theory at
university and a performances of free improvisation and performance art. The
ten songs on „sharp teeth“ are none of that but owe a lot to these
experiences. The freedom and liberty of free improv opens up all kinds of
paths and ideas and renders everything possible that is imaginable for a
song. On the other hand formal theory shows the traditional ways, the
academically correct ways of forming a harmony, a melody or a song. Without
that magic spark called talent, though, all of this means nothing. And
Daniels seems to have that enchanted hand for picking just the right chords,
the right atmospheres for background, the right dynamics and arrangements. A
big cast of musicians helped form this recording (nineteen musicians
mentioned), and picking and directing these is also a lot of work, to make
them do the right things at exactly the right moment.
The pace of the album is usually
slow and dramatic, with some slower and some faster parts include. Images of
an epic tale of family pride, historic events and southern gothic sentiments
evolve from the moist heat of the land. Jesus and the devil appear and look
like twins, the narrator gives in to the desperation that love brings and
decides to „burn for you“. Lovers find out that they are relatives, age
old hatred is revenged and men turn into beasts. All the while a lonely
slide guitar accompanies the gentle, breaking singing voice of Daniels.
Sadness and joy are never closer together, but from their fusion true beauty
springs. The emotions are lush and rich and associations run deep and
touching. Does all of that mean that man is made to break down someday
underneath his own aspirations and desires? Is life nothing but a tough
examination of an individual’s will and skill? The culmination of
„Beast“ is a repeated „you gonna have to look the beast in the face“
while the guitars build more and more dense walls. A good advise.
