ARTiST: J. Tillman
ALBUM: Vacilando Territory Blues
BiTRATE: 150kbps avg
QUALiTY: EAC Secure Mode / LAME 3.97 Final / -V2 --vbr-new / 44.100Khz
LABEL: Bella Union
GENRE: Folk
SiZE: 56.51 megs
PLAYTiME: 0h 49min 27sec total
RiP DATE: 2009-01-19
STORE DATE: 2009-01-16
Track List:
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01. All You See 0:47
02. No Occasion 3:51
03. Firstborn 3:29
04. Vessels 3:46
05. James Blues 2:30
06. Steel On Steel 4:39
07. Laborless Land 3:24
08. Barter Blues 7:24
09. New Imperial Grand Blues 4:02
10. Master's House 4:56
11. Someone With Child 3:16
12. Above All Men 3:53
13. Vacilando Territory 3:30
Release Notes:
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Joshua Tillman has been "releasing" albums since 2004, beginning with his
limited-to-100-copies "I Will Return" ("Grates enormously... merely dirgy and
repetitive" - americana-UK.com) followed by 2005's limited-to-150-copies "Long
May You Run, J. Tillman" which, thanks to support from the blogosphere, broke
his previous sales record by nearly 50 copies. 2006's "Minor Works" released
only in Europe by Fargo Records was met with overwhelming critical ambivalence,
garnering three star reviews from Uncut Magazine and France's Rolling Stone.
2007's "Cancer and Delirium", his best seller to date, was made available online
in the States through Yer Bird records, and, as of this writing, has nearly sold
out of it's initial pressing of 1,000 copies.
Cobbled together from three different recording sessions in 2008, J. Tillman's
fifth, Vacilando Territory Blues, is a wildly uneven record, demanding a
suspension of disbelief that it is in anyway cohesive or deliberate in vision.
Tillman's second record with engineer Kory Kruckenberg finds him over- reaching
more than usual, with mixed results.
Following a failed, and ultimately misguided, attempt at recording "rock" songs
("Steel On Steel", "New Imperial Grand Blues") in an environment purposefully
riddled with obstructions, Tillman, alarmed, violently switched gears, writing a
new group of songs which would manifest as all-too- precious, bloated clunkers
("Barter Blues", "Laborless Land", "No Occasion", "Above All Men"). After
several months living with the first finished version of VTB, Tillman ended up
scrapping several particularly embarrassing songs and recording the remaining
third in Kruckenberg's new house about a week before mastering.
One could make a serious stretch and compare moments of this record to the
strained, ramshackle post-folk of Will Oldham and others to full-moon, creeping
rock of Neil Young, if one were desperate to fill copy in a record review
without having to spend much more than casual listen. Upon serious evaluation
VTB obviously falls short of those comparisons, but typically the purpose of a
bio is to fill the reader's head with approximations, so you'll have to forgive
the indulgences.
VTB succeeds in that it isn't as completely beholden to one over-arching dynamic
as his previous attempts. While the shifts at times appear to be merely for the
sake of being difficult, they are at least interesting in the lowest-common
denominator of value: they don't all sound the same.
Vacilando Territory Blues is available from Bella Union digitally and in stores
this October and January respectively, and Tillman can currently be seen playing
drums for Seattle folk-outfit Fleet Foxes.