At The Cut [Import]

This is a guy I haven't been following very closely, but I recall some older albums of his. I don't really remember the way it sounded then - for some reason Nashville folk-guy Tom House comes to mind - and there are obvious comparisons to Bone Machine-era Tom Waits. But this stuff doesn't really sound like anything I've heard - those are just starting points. You pretty much have to abandon your expectations here if you're new to this. Also, there are obviously going to be people who are new to this guy because of his kinship with Guy of Fugazi, but they'll be fooling themselves if they expect anything close to that band here either. Or any other Dischord-related projects for that matter.

This is one of those albums that needs to be digested as a unit - an entire project - and reflected on - and I have to admit, it's hard to picture myself listening to it again shortly after one play. It just has a deep, scraping darkness to it that isn't very endearing - it's almost as if the songs are MEANT to disturb you - but not in a cartoonish, Tom Waits-y way, much more direct, much more ambivalent about how you feel - as if you weren't really meant to hear these songs. I understand that's not a very glowing endorsement of the sounds here, but that's how it hits you at first. Which is good, if you like to be taken out of your comfort zone.

After a while, you get used to the abrasiveness, sort of embrace the claustrophobic qualities, when all of a sudden it opens up like a landscape in front of you - a very relieving and powerful drama - with the songs "Flirted With You All My Life" and "It Is What It Is" - two back-to-back excellent tracks, ruminations on simple things that don't usually get said but somehow seem very natural and exciting put to music like this. That's when it all really makes sense. The moment you "get" this album, it doesn't strike you as anything too important, but it somehow feels important all the same. This unusual duality - thundering moments combined with a solitude inside - make for a hard listen, but it's pretty rewarding.

This disc is a tough listen. If you think "Flirted with you all my life" was tough to listen to before today......Chesnutt was quoted as saying that this was his "Screw you, death" song. The song that was his final break up with the suicide attempts of the past. If only that were the case.

Chesnutt was a talented, tormented man. With his death, he becomes a national symbol of the health care crisis. In a recent interview printed in the LA TImes he contemplated the challenges he faced as a wheelchair-using paraplegic with inadequate health insurance and mounting medical bills.

"I'm not too eloquent talking about these things," Chesnutt told The Times earlier this month. "I was making payments, but I can't anymore and I really have no idea what I'm going to do. It seems absurd they can charge this much. When I think about all this, it gets me so furious. I could die tomorrow because of other operations I need that I can't afford."

Unfortunately, Chesnutt's "tomorrow" came on Christmas Day. Death came from intentional overdose of muscle relaxants.

God rest your body and soul Vic Chesnutt. May you find peace at last.

Chesnutt is in top form on "At the Cut," both lyrically and musically. Always challenging to listen to--in the same way that, say, Tom Waits is challenging--Chesnutt rewards the attentive listener with a voice matched to the poignant, piquant, oddball poetry. Decorated with spare, graceful instrumentation, each song conveys a mood, a state of mind, impressionistically.

See, I told you it was challenging.

This is not party music, this is not background music...this is frankly art. One hint of that fact, something I really appreciate, is that Chesnutt signposts the source of some of his poetry and music with parenthetical references in the liner note lyric sheet.

My guess is that people would generally be highly divided on Chesnutt, as they can be with any mold-breaking artist with a unique vision. It would be fairly easy to hate the injured-hound voice on some songs, the inscrutable lyrics on another, the discordant arrangement on a third. But for someone willing to invest in a little adventure, the payoff can be extraordinary. I have always found Chesnutt's output, while sometimes initially off-putting, ultimately something I want to dive back into periodically again and again.

Nearly all of Chesnutt's music is intimate. It sounds as if it is being played in a living room, or at its most public, a small coffeehouse or bar. But the CDs only gesture toward the intimacy of a live performance, for which the CDs can only ever be a cheap souvenir. If Chesnutt is appearing near you, especially in a dive of some kind, for gawd's sake go see him. There's something about the brokenness of his music that only really shines through live. There's this Japanese term, "wabi-sabi," that points to the beauty of the "imperfect and impermanent." The Chesnutt concerts (which seems like too commercial a word for what they felt like) were profoundly wabi-sabi affairs...and among the greatest art experiences of my life.

NOTE ADDED AFTER CHRISTMAS: It is heartbreaking to report that Vic ended his difficult life on Christmas Day, 2009, so if you haven't already seen him, his recorded music is all you'll have. At the risk of editorializing, I wish to say that it's hard for me not to conclude that to some degree, Vic was a victim of a broken health care system. In an interview on National Public Radio he expressed that he was no longer able to keep up with his medical bills and didn't know what he was going to do the next time he needed life-saving surgery. I don't know but suspect that his suicide might have been the solution of someone who just couldn't take it any more. Perhaps no amount of health care reform could save everyone in Vic's position, but it's hard for me to imagine that compassionate and affordable care might not have made a difference. To those who have stood opposed to reasonable access to care for those who need it: Vic just might have died for your sins.