Home > Magazine > Content
Reviews: Brian Butler ~ Axuality, Volume 1
Posted on Saturday, July 12, 2008 @ 21:20:22 PDT
Topic: Reviews
|
Artist: Brian Butler
CD: Axuality, Volume 1
Home: Minneapolis, Minnesota
Style: Improvisational Guitar
Quote: "He delivers structure, flavor and warm humanity even when perhaps he didn't expect to succeed so well."
By Barney Quick
One of the delights you find in the indie music world that you’re much less likely to encounter from someone who has jumped through all the hoops to land a label deal is unabashed individuality. Take the case of Brian Butler, the Axuality man. He’s clearly not trying to cater to some preconceived market or fit into any established genre.
Mind you, sometimes this approach leads to a hopeless mess, but not in Butler’s case. He delivers structure, flavor and warm humanity even when perhaps he didn’t expect to succeed so well.
He calls what he does “Improvisational RockJazz Guitar” and even has a logo for Axuality. It’s not a band; I think he’s playing all the instruments, certainly all the guitar parts. It’s somewhat akin to those music-therapy / ambience recordings, in that he explicitly says in his promotional copy that Axuality will reduce stress and induce inspired mental states. Mostly, it’s a celebration of the gorgeous sounds an electric arch top guitar can produce.
The photos on Butler’s website present him as the quintessential normal guy - normal clothes, normal hair, normal way of carrying himself - which adds all the more charm to his eccentricity. He fashions this wonderfully quirky artistic vision with rather uneventful ingredients. That goes for the layers of guitar on this record as well. There’s only enough effects-pedal signal alteration to give him two or three tones to work with per song. A little reverb here, a little flange there, a little, wah-wah here, a little delay there. None of it gratuitous, though.
His bio says that he studied the styles of Johnny Smith, Wes Montgomery, Barney Kessel and other jazz greats as a kid, but here he mainly sticks pretty close to either diatonic or bluesy changes, imparting distinction to them with little licks and flourishes he creates on the spot. They sound like carefully thought-out hooks, which is a testament to the amount of music that has flowed through Butler’s mind over the course of his life.
The infrequent snippets of vocal on this album mostly consist of little spoken life observations or philosophical musings. The one fully sung tune, complete with lyrics, is a jaunty mid-1960s folk-rock kind of shuffle, a la Lovin’ Spoonful or Buffalo Springfield. Over the lazy-day guitar figures, Butler lays down a two-note melody over the verse, a tonic lifting up to a fifth on the last word of the first and third lines, and an uninterrupted tonic over the second and fourth lines. It’s hard to describe in a way that doesn’t convey monotony, because that’s not the resulting effect at all. The refrain consists of the girl’s-name song title, "Emmalene," sung in a clipped little first-inversion triad. Astoundingly simple, but unexpectedly catchy, to the point where, after two or three listenings, one is singing it the rest of the day.
What Butler has done is use reflections on particular aspects of life - the nature of certain kinds of relationships, moments from various periods in his own life, the way certain imagined scenes or works of literature affect us - as launching points for musical statements. One particularly effective translation from memory to tune is "A Long Long Tuesday Until Friday," which captures the tedium of the miles between oneself and one’s lover. The minor-chord-with-a-major-seventh section of tension in "His Very Favorite Blue" anthemically expresses Butler’s reflection on purpose, intention and decision.
Lest any of this sound like it's traversing the terrain of greeting-card over-earnestness, consider Butler’s liner notes for the whimsically meandering "Dance The Walltop": "It’s kind of like little guys dancing on the walls. You realize it’s pretty sober after all though, once you watch them." How’s that again?
In an age in which the guitar is too often used to display feigned attitude or to show off chops as though they were some kind of medals won for heroic ardor, Butler reminds us that making great sounds come out of these exquisitely crafted pieces of wood is, most importantly, a sheer joy. Let us hope he has a lot more Axuality in him. The world could use it.
Artist Website: http://www.axuality.com
|
|
| |
|
Indie-Music
Profile
