After Everything Else

After Everything Else (AEE) is the second album released in the last five years by singer-songwriter Scott Allender. It is a significant departure from the first album in theme, complexity and musical maturity. The album itself pushes to defy convention, though perhaps in a way more subtle than many recent efforts on the market today. AEE references several other genres, not looking to deconstruct or redefine them as bands such as Wilco and Radio Head have aimed to do for rock – or as Okkerville River for folk via Southern Gothic styled lyrics – but to acknowledge and borrow a composite of influences from each of them. 

Lyrically the album is somewhere between folk and country, offering sweeping narrative lyrics that are emotionally oriented and relationship centric. These narratives are told through a high register vocal that suggests the influence of late-eighties vocalists – unexpected as most male folk or country artists give us the gruff lower-register vocal of a man down on his luck. These vocal stylings are ushered to the listener on a sonic canvas that gives a nod to some jam band and blues-oriented rock conglomerates such as Pink Floyd, Grateful Dead and Phish. All of this considered, perhaps the most striking element of the album is the way that it deals with the theme of searching – certainly the most predominant theme and one that is present throughout. 

Even from the first few bars of the record, the album sets the mood of disorientation as vocals enter in a distorted and low register – a sound that will not occur again throughout the duration of the album: “A long long time ago, love was sold to feeling / and feeling won’t give it back”. Our narrator is seeking to find his voice. Throughout the whole of the album the music is meandering and wandering. Melodies are introduced, often to appear once and never return. Instrument voicing are unnatural and unconventional, nothing quite sounds as it should. Form is following directly behind function. This, to me, is the key indicator that this is a mature and self-aware instance of musical storytelling and expression. It is also testimony again to the power of an album over the cache of a single. The songs need each other to complete their expression. One song alone misses the point. 

And then there are the lyrics.

AEE song by song does not dwell on the reality of one searching as a process, whether that search be for repaired relationship or true love. The search is not teleological, it is not concerned with whether the search should end – in fact many of the songs provide it as a given that it will not: “The search goes on and on and on”. What the album does posit however is that there is a valuable and permanent state of being in what is seen by most as the transitory state of searching. AEE is an exploration of the emotional pallet of this sense of the search both in its highs and in its lows.. Certainly there are highs on this album, there are praises, that posit this, statements in the vein of what Janis Joplin said best - “Freedom is having nothing left to loose”. Then there are the lows. Those reflections that having nothing left to loose is not freedom at all but is a loneliness and an absence that only bears more heartbreak.

Aesthetically and sonically the album is something that plays well in the background. The complexities of the arrangements and instrumental flourishes allow it to fill background space nicely; something to let sound at the end of a long day as a background hmmmm. Alternatively, given the narrative nature of the lyrics, it is something that can be considered, focused on and thought about. This is my chosen mode of listening. 

AEE is clearly the product of collaboration. A collaborative exercise of musicians that have looked to take rather straight-forward chord progressions and turn them into winding and often dissident twists and twiddles. Also a collaboration of different styles and different experiences as indicated by the “Thank You’s” of the album that address not only musical influences, but friends, family and the makers of various after-hour consumables. 

AEE does not offer the listener much hope of moving forward, but instead gives a testimony of the importance reflecting on the journey, and to consider what it is that we spend our time searching for; that for better or worse, richer or poorer the search will go on. 

What I took from the album is a warning to make certain that the things I am searching for lead to a process and search itself worth embarking on. For me the narrator acted as a negative example – that to spend a lifetime searching simply for relational fulfillment or definition therein is a rather torturous and schizophrenic decision. I think this is the intention of the author. Because, the album warns, after everything else, it may well be the pursuit itself that we are left with.
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Damien Rice meets John Bon Jovi meets Scott Allender.  A great departure from "Take Me Anywhere".  Check this one out.
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More than the the great tunes and sounds, are the words that speak to my heart and soul. I love that I am drawn to listen again and again and get something new each time.
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Sonic Catharsis. I love the broad, sweeping sounds set against human-scale, personal lyrics. This is really a great discovery.
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