Karl Blau - "AM"

Karl Blau - "Spring Morning" (Whistler 2008)

Karl Blau – AM / Whistler

I suppose it is appropriate that Karl Blau – an eclectic, DIY-savvy singer/songwriter from northern Washington state – chose A.A. Milne as the muse for a record. Though known almost unanimously at this point for penning the Disney-hijacked Winnie-the-Pooh stories, Milne was a widely varied writer. Primarily a playwright, he as well penned a number of novels (both fiction and non-fiction), newspaper articles, poems and humor pieces, but it all became overshadowed by the looming figure of his son, Christopher Robin, and his animated stuffed animals.

Looming over Blau is his association to D+, a trio formed by Beat Happening’s singer/guitarist Bret Lunsford and featuring drummer Phil Elvrum – who has gone on to make quite the indie-quirk name himself as The Microphones and Mount Eerie. Blau’s eclectic career, now spanning over a decade, somewhat compares with Milne’s own as the multi-instrumentalist tackles a number of different mediums to release his music, which itself is quite stylistically varied though rooted in the Northwest lo-fi indie-pop approach.

This is the second release of AM, an album inspired by the literary works of Milne and that daily reminder of life when night and day briefly cross paths, shake hands with a respectful nod and trade posts: dawn. Re-mixed, re-mastered and re-sequenced from the original release, which was only available through Blau’s own refreshing DIY periodical-label Kelp Lunacy, AM 2.0 is being released by Chicago’s Whistler Records for a wider audience.

The music is what you’ve come to expect from Blau and his K/Marriage/Knw-Yr-Own counterparts: creative and colorful; endearingly lo-fi; encompassing indie-rock, psych, folk, and the skeletal remains of soul and reggae; and most importantly, oddly charming. For an outside comparison, AM stumbles along not unlike Joan of Arc’s most recent Eventually, All at Once. The compositions, though obtusely structured, chug along behind Blau’s guitar with cut-and-paste drum syncopations and blinking melodic embellishments – keyboards, mallet instruments, accordion, ambient chirps and the occasional electronic whiz. The songwriting, again like that of Tim Kinsella or Elvrum and to an extent Syd Barrett, is the sewn together thoughts of a man who spends a lot of time meandering down sidewalks, half-heartedly walking between the cracks partly because it’s fun partly because it’s a challenge (however miniscule), mentally patching together ideas with current inspirations and eventually concluding before a microphone, guitar and tape recorder. It’s honest, rudimentary, thoughtful and charming.

Like most eclectic lo-fi pop affairs, AM shines when Blau finds a sprightly groove out of odd superimpositions of melody and instrumentation. “Spring Morning” features a skeletal snare beat and shaker rhythm lilted by a surprisingly colorful bass, warmly reverberating electric guitar, melodica and Blau’s everyman vocals. It begins in Northwest twee-pop territory and ends somewhere in Southeast Kingston. In stark contrast, “Lake King’s Daughter” pays dues to prog-rock with its amateurish-but-endearing (perhaps consciously so) guitar noodlery and analog keyboard effects. At just less than three-minutes, there is nothing over-the-top about it, but the stylistic difference is outstanding. The rest of the album follows suit in its eclecticism: the The Glow, pt.2-esque “Yellow Sunbonnet”, the near-tribal “Noah Richards Son”, the pastoral folk-guitar ambience of “Of Birds”, or the just plain catchy “In the Morning”.

If you are already a fan of the Northwest indie-rock scene, AM is probably the album you were looking for when Blau traded in his folk guitar for dance beats and echo effects on 2007’s Dance Positive (which is not a stab at the record by any means). It is just in more of the D+ vein of minimalist and obtuse indie-pop. With Milne as the muse and Day and Night as the storybook’s main characters, Blau fashions an endearing fairy tale of wistful psych-folk illustrated with dawn’s beaming rays of optimism and peacefulness. In fact, where most records of this style are better suited for lonesome late nights when you are just looking for an accessible voice to keep you company, AM is – yes – best suited for those first moments after waking up; when you need a voice, simple and sincere, to accompany the fantastic display of the sun rising over the horizon.