Track of the Week: "Don't Say No" by Patrick Wolf

This will be the inaugural posting of a new weekly feature on "Thy is a Word". As the roughly three readers of this blog know well, I'm rather addicted to music of all kinds. I buy records and compact discs impulsively and then struggle to digest them all before my next pilgrimage to the record shop (which is a fantastic 'High Fidelity' establishment in downtown Missoula).

While studying for my undergraduate degree I greatly enjoyed the friendship of a number of individuals who shared my interests. With them, I discussed music, created music, and spent long hours absorbing recordings in a shared experience of aesthetic transcendence.

I no longer have the same amount of time to devote to exciting music but plan to begin posting a concise music review on a weekly basis. Though I tend to assess albums as single tonal art-works (due in part to the fact that the majority of the musicians and songwriters I admire are less single conscious than some of their more commercially oriented colleagues), and LP's/CD's as art-objects, the limits of time will demand that I focus on single tracks. Track of the Week, which will usually be posted on Sundays, will be a short review of the song or piece of music that's getting the most playtime. My focus will be further restricted to analysis of what I hear in the track. If you (like me) want the juicy pop culture tidbits, enjoy the rest of the www.



Track: "Don't Say No"
Artist: Patrick Wolf
Album/Year: Lycanthropy/2003

Track Rating: 3
Album Rating: 4

I picked up Lycanthropy around a month ago on Lapsarian's recommendation. Though I found the album very interesting and enjoyable on the first listen-through, I'm only now developing a listening awareness of the complexities of some of its more densely produced songs. One of the chief strengths of Wolf's music is the juxtaposition of Old World instrumentation and melodic sensibilities with overtly contemporary and frequently fragmented rhythmic textures. In "Don't Say No", both of these elements are manipulated to great success. The track begins with a taut fingerpicked arpeggio which introduces one of the main chordal cadences before being joined by syncopated distortions and a haunting choral sample. Wolf's voice soon joins the mix. His vocals are boyish and quavery and often layered with subtle delays and reverbs mirroring the overall clash of acoustic tone and electronic manipulation. It is a testament to Wolf's skill as a vocalist that he can carry the song in these early sections with only minimal tonal accompaniment supporting his voice. This allows for lean NINesque backbeats that build through the song's first verse into the channel.

The climax comes when Wolf is joined by an echoing chorus for the lyrical hook of the track "Don't Say No To It/You Can't Say No To It." By "It" I read Wolf to mean the inevitable. Inevitable giant currents weaving around sun...to paraphrase. "If you're brave enough you'll just let it happen/If you're brave enough you'll give yourself away." Not the best crafted words of the album to be sure, but when sung amidst the swirling genius of Wolf's formidable sequencing they emerge with optimistic desperation in the face of confused desires and murderous dreams.

"Don't Say No" encapsulates much of what makes Wolf a unique voice in contemporary music: it recklessly deconstructs reserved, "safe" notions of what a song should be or sound like and yet retains worthwhile notions of melodic lyricism and spacial pacing. In this respect, I see Björk Gudmundsdóttir as one of Wolf's most notable predecessors.