In a live, pro-shot take of “Grace” from his debut, Harlequin, Angeleno Alex Izenberg kneads the keyboard of a baby grand as if it is candy glass or smeared with d-CON, as if—with one false move—the instrument might crumble or kill him. The camera he eyes with a look of irritated Westerbergian incredulity. He is—sincerely and, one can assume, preferably—barely there, or wishing he wasn’t at all.
A kindred air of detachment haunts the video that complements “Sister Jade,” from this year’s Caravan Château, in which a disheveled and despondent Izenberg, splashed with projections of psychedelia or cast in silhouette, sings in the dark of a phantom’s heart (his) wooing an imagined lover. He is, again, like the tom keeping time, barely there, an apparition.
Izenberg’s songs are infused with absences. They are, deceptively, not much—think lacework and cigarette smoke, things a hair’s breadth from ruin. Barroom pianos tiptoeing between schmaltzy violins thinner than the line dividing them from pastiche. Boneheaded beatnik rhythms and skeletal tambourines traipsing beneath his pillow-soft warble and the shy strums of a lone guitar. They are, by design, barely there, beamed from between stations through the static of half a century, songs—in their naivety and harmless pretense—of a piece with the living room ballet recital or a country church ensemble, betraying not the shortcomings of Izenberg’s songwriting but his especial genius.
Critics are quick on the draw in labeling his sound—nostalgic, poetic, orchestral, baroque, jazzy. The touchstones, to their credit, aren’t misplaced, just dog-eared and—perhaps inescapably—insufficient. (“Writing about music,” said journalist Robert Christgau, “is writing first.”) Yes, Château is literally a product of Laurel Canyon—two of the LP’s eleven compositions were recorded there—and Albion lore—the lines “My Levi’d sister / I gently kissed her” from “Disraeli Woman” are lifted, almost verbatim, from King Crimson’s “Ladies of the Road.” And Izenberg, on wax and in interviews, does little to disguise his aesthetic debts. (In fact his genre, if one can be discerned, tends to flaunt them, ironically, as a hallmark of authenticity.) But his thievery—including the “Revolution 9”-inspired bad trip coda that unravels “Revolution Girls”—should be forgiven; the songs—even the rip-offs—are good, and they’re his.
Château sashays in with a bit of twang and late-night sleaze before settling into a thematic set of forlorn troubadour balladry, a love letter to love, essentially, dripping with Pynchonian allusion and dream-speak. Our lovesick narrator, young harlots and blue-eyed women indulge in vintage wines and sunsets, brave labyrinths and “crimson coves,” speak of “weeping flowers in heaven” and the “sins of law and beauty.” Strangers fall “like leaves” and dance on daffodils. Paint fills the sea. Izenberg, a schizophrenic, is communicating in the language of childish enchantment a vision of things hidden to reasonable, well-adjusted adults. He is an obscurantist, a capital-ar Romantic and seducer born in the wrong century. (“The castle feels my sorrow,” he sings on “Saffron Glimpse.”) His misfortune, however, is our blessing—Château, sauntering to the bar cart in its shambly bathrobe, is a reminder of what modernity subjugates to pragmatism and power in its relentless project to mechanize and perfect: love, our very humanity, true art, wonder, Alan Watts’ “marvelous system of wiggles” that is this world.
The record’s earthy rhythms and tones conjure the seedier side of rock and folk’s Belle Époque—say, Los Angeles in the early Seventies—but there’s something simultaneously medieval and à la mode in its dingy costume, too. Take, for instance, the imagery of the lines, “Bouquets falling in the rain / We were sadness and estranged / Your lips were made of dust,” superimposed atop two “Imagine”-ish piano chords and, eventually, a soaring flute motif, stuttering drums and a bed of sinister baritone saxophones—the effect is narcotic, primordial, endearingly self-conscious. But innovative? Hardly. (“It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time,” wrote Solomon in Ecclesiastes.) It mustn’t be. Derek Jeter will soon reside in Cooperstown beside Jackie Robinson, Joe DiMaggio and Honus Wagner, not because he invented a novel way to swing on a 3-2 slider but because he did it exceptionally well in much the same fashion—on the same diamonds, with the same wooden bats—as the legends of yore. This is how Château—in its sonic vernacular, “old coat” chord progressions and wabi-sabi performances—plays ball, too: in a metaphysical throwback jersey. Everything old is new again.
Château is, in that sense, palpably classic in its execution and in its fellowship with the iconic works of Southern California’s finest misfit melody-makers. (See Harry Nilsson, Brian Wilson, Ariel Pink, Tobias Jesso, Jr.) The album art (a surreal collage of sea coral, Asiatic ruins, eyeballs and fantastical landscapes), the accompanying font (ITC Serif Gothic, released in 1972, as seen on Scott Walker, Abba and Rush LP jackets), the aforementioned grainy camcorder footage, his pronunciation—without a wink—of “dance” like “ponce”—all of it is part and parcel of a phenomenological tradition hoisted from the dollar bins of a less cynical, less sterile, still haunted age; one of mist and myth and madness. (“Hey hey, my my / Rock and roll can never die,” Neil Young promised.) It may exist now in only a handful of heads—it may, in fact, be only a trick of a single unsound mind—but with Château’s humble pocket symphonies Izenberg has reproduced a kind of date-night Art Brut Camelot of immortal forms and designs to ensnare his Guinevere. Chivalry is dead, you say?
The kings are gone but they’re not forgotten.
Image: Giraffe, Nicky and Juliana (Directors). (2020). Alex Izenberg – Sister Jade (Official Video) [Video file]. Retrieved October 20, 2020, from https://www.youtube.com
Impolitic 