Kevin Salem and his never-ending always surprising sound's of today; Some things are bound to change as an indie rocker goes Ecstatic

"Does he still sound like Dylan?" an old friend asked of me when I mentioned the new Kevin Salem disc in a phone conversation. "Dylan?" I snapped, pouncing on this inane query. Uncertain of how I would disarm this blowhard assertion I added, for emphasis, "Fucking Dylan? You gotta be shitting me?"

"No, I’m not, I thought he’d sounded like, you know, a cooler, younger Dylan on that last record."

I was stunned. "Dylan?" I said again, sounding quizzical and pretty stupid, even to myself, by now. "No, he sounds more like Tom Petty this time around," I drooled. It was as smart-assed a comment as I could come up with in the midst of a flabbergasted stupor – and, for obvious effect, I purposefully draped the retort in a thick soapy lather of sarcasm.

"Oh, cool," he said, "Maybe I’d like it then."

I hung up.

I should have gone with the Petty thing, if only to coax the shmuck into buying the goddamn record just to hear it all himself. But, if the guy had liked the, ahem, Dylan-esque Glimmer I’m not so sure how I’d sell this one to him. It’s an awful long goddamn walk from Glimmer to Salem’s new one Ecstatic. So far in fact, that my friend would probably hear Neil Diamond in Ecstatic where he’d heard Dylan in Glimmer’s grooves. Which, I guess, isn’t the worse fate in this rockroll life we try and lead.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s the point. I don’t know that I’d ever heard Bob Dylan in anything Kevin Salem has ever done, but going back in curiosity to Glimmer and 1994’s Soma City I don’t hear anything that sounds like the Dylan my friend claims to hear (save, perhaps, the drawling vocals of Salem), but I don’t hear anything come close to resembling the 2001 Ecstatic Kevin Salem either.

When I first got my hands on Ecstatic I was dead set on doing the whole journalistic spiel; I’d call Salem, do the usual chit chat, and get the goddamn story so to speak. I usually hate that approach (and rarely, as is obvious, take it), but some characters are much to intriguing to let the chance for a talk slip away. Salem and I had spoken before, and it was a king-hell good timey talk – the kind that can remind a writer-fan that not every rockroller has to be a wicked dick about their art. Kevin Salem is just one of those top-shelf type characters (critical flattery gone amuck, I know, but fuck it, the guy was way straight-up with me – and that’s the tops in my book).

A funny thing happened along the way to the story that you folks wanted – I couldn’t help myself and I listened to Ecstatic. Not once, not twice, not three, four, or five times – but endlessly (I’m listening to it right now my fingers clickety-clack on these keys). I’ve listened to it drunk, and I’ve listened to it sober. I’ve listened to it loud, and I’ve listened to it quiet. I’ve played it while driving 85 mph down a country road with the windows wide open and a beer can in my hand, and I’ve listened to it sitting in 5 pm after work traffic, widows closed, and me raining hatred on every moving thing around me. I have played the disc enough times, in enough places, in enough ways, and in enough moods that it seems as though it should have no place left to survive as the soundtrack to what should be a reasonable life. But it does.

Ecstatic is a rare record in that it’s – and, God, I’m going to hate myself for using this shitty word here – pliant. It adaptable. It doesn’t dwell on one sound, or a set of sounds repeated. Ecstatic is diverse. And Ecstatic, gulp, although a Kevin Salem record, has no guitars. Ok, well, that’s a lie – it certainly has guitars, but man are they buried. And Kevin Salem doesn’t bury guitars. Or, at least, he didn’t used to.

What the fuck is he up to?
I don’t know man.
Isn’t he the guy who played guitar in Dumptruck on for the country?
Yeah, that’s him.
And he did that indie-alt rock Soma City thing?
Yeah.
And that totally hard-assed crunchy Glimmer?
Yep.
And produced that last Giant Sand guitar God record?
Parts of it, yep.
Then what the fuck man? What’s up with all of the fucking production and shit?
I dunno.

"Less guitar. Less hearing loss." Salem writes on his bio/tear-sheet for Ecstatic. He ain’t lying either. The last time I talked to him he was just finishing up his work with Howe Gelb and Giant Sand and had turned his sights towards "a bunch of songs I’ve started and stopped for awhile", songs that, Salem said, were different than what he’s done before, stuff he found more interesting nowadays. Still, it would’ve been difficult to imagine this.

A piano lumbers through the intro on "1000 Miles"- Ecstatic’s opening number; behind it a Hammond b-3 hums. The piano is toying at a jazz-laced bass line as it trounces through the lower octaves; the drum pierces the music with hole-punch consistency. It’s clean. Salem’s voice joins the fray. Restrained, easy, and fluid, it’s gracious to the rest of the songs parts. Background voices whir into the refrain. Salem sounds nothing like Dylan, maybe a touch like Petty in very small clips, and an awful lot – at times – like his former sidekick in Dumptruck Seth Tiven, and "1000 Miles" sounds nothing like Kevin Salem as he once was.

It’s a terrific and gorgeous opening song, and it assertively announces Salem’s change in heart and musical direction (although the closing guitar solo does ring as very real Kevin Salem). And it’s a good move. Salem sounds utterly convincing on the song; he sounds comfortable in ways he never could/did when he was roaring away in a band of guitars.

Two very sublime pop songs follow "1000 Miles". "The Medicine Down" streams from the fade in "1000 Miles" and it plays opposites with its predecessor, a tributary to "1000 Miles" river. "The Medicine Down" is clean, acoustic-strum pop replete with ‘oh-oh-ooohs’, crescendo decrescendo ‘ahhh-la-la-la’s’, and a smart guitar and vocal breakdown in its final third. "Kindness" follows suit, easy-going, and once again finding Salem finding his voice – literally (maybe he’s not supposed to be a howler after all!).

It’s here where we run into what may someday amount to Salem’s finest moment. "It’s Only Life" is as keen and razor sharp a pop song as anyone would dare dream of writing. It’s lyrically sensible and smart; it’s near flawless in conception and execution. Salem uses a stream-of-conscious acoustic riff to pad the floor for the bursts of imagery that float around the song (at one point Salem even works a short rapping break into the songs heart – and it flat out works!). It’s not a ‘message’ song, but it makes its point. A truly terrific song – and again, hardly Kevin Salem at all. Or so we thought.

"It sounds kind of like a Beatles record," said a girl I played it for. She liked it. She made the Beatles comment during a cut titled "End of the Addiction". I, recalling the uncomfortable Dylan comparison of a few days before, nodded and said that the song could pass for a John Lennon type thing. I also agreed with her in the way that Ecstatic is dense – it’s a ‘production’ record that even Salem calls a "modern record" – and in that way, yes, it is comparable to the Beatles ambitious ‘productions’ and their keen ear for modernity.

"Yeah," I said to her appreciatively, "I think you’re right. I can hear where you might say that." I’d almost finished my compliment when she interrupted my, "You’re pretty perceptive musically" with a mood souring "He sounds just like that Soul Asylum singer guy! God, he was cute!" So much for love.

But who needs love when you’ve got music? Especially music as diverse as Ecstatic. Kevin Salem got tired of noise, singular guitar noise, and he traded his weariness in on the idea that he could do something more, that he could use texture, that he could use color, that he could escape the confines of his own musical past and forge his way into the uncertain future using all that he could get his hands on. It took 5 years of starts and stops, many moods, and many, many changes, but Salem finally molded a lifetime’s worth of ambiguous musical clay into something that may forever stand in his name as the best that he’s ever done. And, for what it's worth, it'll remain some of the best that I’ve heard for quite some time.

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