Shearwater’s Jet Plane And Oxbow is an album that looks backward—to the recording technologies and sounds of the early ’80s—in order to interrogate the present and to contemplate the future. Shearwater’s moody, thoughtful style, built around Jonathan Meiburg’s dramatic, beautiful voice, turned toward rock with 2012’s Animal Joy, which now sounds like a stopover in the flight path toward Jet Plane. Meiburg used period-specific instruments; his guitar playing alludes to Adrian Belew’s work with David Bowie and Robert Fripp’s with Peter Gabriel; he integrates the stark sounds of Joy Division and early New Order. But the goal wasn’t nostalgia. Jet Plane doesn’t sound retro, nor does it sound like an homage. The allusions are there to create a sonic parallel to our time. Meiburg will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new Shearwater feature.
Meiburg: Nina Simone could make brilliant performances look easy; she could also make them look as hard as they actually were, and even her exhaustion is riveting. But this set catches her early in her career, in the cozy Village Gate (now Le Poisson Rouge), and in a few quiet moments in the show you can even hear people talking and the clinking of glasses. Without a legend to uphold, Simone sings and plays as if she’s got something to prove and doesn’t mind the challenge, and her voice and piano are in top form; there’s even a vocal-less take on “Bye Bye Blackbird” that reminds me, for the thousandth time, how completely unfair it was that she could sing like that and play like that, too. She’d be one of my favorite musicians even if she’d never sung a note.
Her voice is at an especially interesting point in this recording, though; she was still doing some of the more mannered, classical-sounding singing she later more or less ditched, but there’s a rawness lurking at the edges of it that she ollies up to and grinds on now and again, and it’s electrifying every time. The vengeful fire and bitterness that animated her performances in the later half of the decade aren’t there yet, either; instead we get the subversive beauty and aching plainness of “Brown Baby,” a raved-up, minor-key “Children Go Where I Send You” (“I’m gonna send you one-byyyyyy-one! I’m gonna send you none-by-none!”) and a gorgeous sketch of Olatunji’s “Zungo” This lady can play all night, and all morning, too, if she wants, I’m never leaving. (Opening for her that night, by the way, in his first-ever standup performance, was Richard Pryor.)
