Jose Gonzalez and the Death of the Album

At a glance, last night's performance by Argentinean/Swede folk phenom Jose Gonzalez wasn't much to see: the final set of a two-day, sold-out stand at Yoshi's in Oakland, CA, mostly featured Gonzalez at center stage, hunched over a nylon-string guitar. Sitting between a heavy red curtain and a curious mix of the jazz club's typical chardonnay-and-maki crowd and reverent doe-eyed fans, he was occasionally buttressed by singer Yukimi Nagamo and percussionist Erik Bodin. There was almost no banter ("This song," he said in the honeyed shush of a yoga instructor, "is about tribalism") and few frills beyond those inherent in Gonzalez's faux-traditional Brazilian finger-picking and melancholic evocation of Joao Gilberto. Even the setlist -- drawn from his similarly elegant, bare pair of albums and scattered with new material -- didn't raise eyebrows, save for a forceful cover of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" that was trotted out for an encore. But, Gonzalez demonstrated that he's one of the most commanding songwriters of recent years by achieving the difficult task of what architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe called "an interesting plainness." The set also made it plainly apparent, and never more serenely unobjectionable, that Gonzalez, is also someone who thrives in an industry that's seen the death of the album-based career. He could be the poster child of its passing.

It seemed fairly inconsequential 10 years ago, when I got the first whiff of the imminent demise of the album while standing in the back of Detroit's Majestic Theater. A member of the Atomic Numbers -- one of the many great denim-rock purists operating in the city at the time -- made an obligatory sales pitch with a droll explanation that the vinyl records for sale were "like an MP3 you can touch."

The quip was darkly prognostic given the decade that's followed -- scenes of collectors dumping years worth of accrued CDs into iPods MP3 devices before selling 'em all back, the trickle-turned-torrent of file sharing, and the steadily more dire situation for the behemoth of the record industry. By the time the meteors had stopped falling, the consensus was that an artist's survival had returned to the basics that looked like a 1960s model: big singles and well-paid gigs. An album -- as a concept -- had joined the ranks of the sarabande and eight-track cassette as a musical notion whose era had passed.            

At SXSW in 2006, when this concept really started to sink in, Gonzalez was fairly new to American audiences, introduced by the success "Heartbeats," a cover of a fairly obscure Swedish laptop rock band, The Knife, that landed in a television commercial. Aided by a few thousand bouncy balls, he was every indie folk fan's new favorite cardigan. Touting a hastily recorded debut that was reissued a number of times, he seemed to be everywhere, playing radio shows and parties around Austin. In the four times that weekend, every set included "Heartbeats."

The Gonzalez that held court at Yoshi's is a decidedly more commanding performer than the one of just a year and a half ago, even with his obligatory pass of "Heartbeats" (probably the least impassioned performance of the evening, certainly the most impassioned response). In the small venue, the rapt audience spoke to the nature of Gonzalez's success -- which, even with the release of a follow-up record last year -- seems so emblematic of the wilting importance of album-based careers. He introduced another song, toward the end of his set saying, "This is about the sky." It sounded just like all the rest of them. It was lovely. You could say it too was like an MP3 you can touch, but, somehow more touching. 
             

Comments

[psherburne]

Nice writeup, Nate. Out of curiosity, did he do a cover of Bronski Beat's "Smalltown Boy"? He pulled that out in Cologne a month or two ago, and it was one of the highlights of the night.