Slow Learner, In Their Time They Are Magnificent

Michael Napolitano doesn’t want to go, that much we know. How do we know it? Because “I don’t want to go” is the first line of the record. “Retreasion” (really spelled that way, btw) repeats the denial several times, with varying degrees of apprehension, before letting the vocal dissolve into the swell of piano around it. The verses that follow are made of the same twilight stuff, though the accompanying organic (as in, “from an organ”) menace is offset by newly crystalline playing, via a piano line that sounds like teeth being polished.

This is music that’s easy to describe but it’s a little bit more difficult to qualify; i.e., it seems easy enough (even fair) to describe the album as soft, blue, and pallid, but deciding whether or not that’s a good thing? That’s a little tough. Why? Because more than anything, this album is vague, vaguely sad (arguably, vague and sad), vaguely uneasy, but more than anything, vague. Napolitano doesn’t want to go, obviously, but the why of it, the where to which he doesn’t want to go, remain unclear. Stories start and stop, images emerge from the mist and as quickly evanesce; the narrative never really comes together. What we’re left with are lines tossed off in the relative dark of the album (“I know you’re in there / Somewhere”) and a can’t-quite-place-it sense of mourning. Something’s been lost, something’s gone missing, something unspecified, sure, but something. In a less than generous moment, one could dismiss the album as adult contemporary, but that would ignore its dirge-like sensibility and lushness.

Slow Learner sounds like a watered down Black Heart Procession or even a confident, baritone version of The Eels, said version of course being inferior to the original but not so inferior as to be dismissed solely for being so. The musicianship, at least, is beyond reproach; Napolitano, the frontman, the sole songwriter, and, largely, the sole performer on this record, thinks big and deep and dark. Think granite-hard folk music draped with a black carpet of electronic shimmer. But though In Their Time They Are Magnificent lacks nothing in ambition, completion itself eludes. Individual songs resemble nothing so much as grand yet already crumbling staircases that lead to nothing and nowhere. Magnificent is not a palace — it’s barely a place, a series of loosely connected ruins, an assemblage of fragments that do not make a whole.

Drunken, lurching lullabies (“Martyr” and “Ringing in the New Year”) alternately skitter and crescendo; their music-box moments are pretty but on edge, manic, even. Clean pop songs weave walls of sound around themselves, but it’s all more ornamental than not. Nothing seems out of place, but nothing, really , ever seems necessary. “Holding on to Yourself” moves from campfire tearjerker (complete with an almost gushy slide guitar) to something melodic but not much more than that, the whole of it (whatever it is) indistinct. The lyrics, opaque throughout (“The work is never done”), are occasionally and simply bad (for example: “I’d like to leave smiles / Down at your feet / To make you look / At your shoes”). The nervous first half of “Minister of Magicians and Whores” gives way to a cymbal-ridden din, a sort of nightmare version of a marching band. “East River Blues” cuts itself into ribbons, not ending but rather erasing itself. The first two minutes of “White Walls” sound like someone waiting silently for high tide. The tide’s sprawl, pale and loud, sweeping over the rest of the song, has nothing to with the waiting.

But if this is a bad thing, it isn’t only a bad thing. There are no connections here, but there is always the faint glimmer of possibility. Flawed though it may be, the record is also unsettling, beautifully unsettling. The unresolved problems, the stories that abstract themselves from meaning, the images that adhere to nothing… This waking dream of half-built bridges and small, porcelain melodies has a somnolent appeal. Nowhere isn’t much of a destination. But who hasn’t wanted go there, even if only for a little while?