A wag once wrote that "Doveman sings sad songs about girls," which is true, but that's like saying Moby Dick is about a guy who chases a whale. Doveman's music is indeed sad-and romantic in every sense of the word-but it is a good deal richer and stranger than that description would suggest. It draws deeply from downtown jazz, new classical, slowcore, debonair '60s pop, and ambient music; the literate lyrics are strewn with obscure allusions and phrases of rarified poetry; the music is as sophisticated as it is understated. Time Out New York once remarked that Doveman singer Thomas Bartlett "often sounds as if he's on the brink of passing out from heartache fumes," but Doveman's debut album The Acrobat isn't about fainting but rather the rapturous swoon which precedes it.
The Acrobat is reminiscent of downbeat masters of melancholy like Nick Drake, Before and After Science-era Eno, and the latter-day Talk Talk; the band has dubbed it "insomnia pop," and indeed the music has the unmistakable ring of pre-dawn loneliness, as intimate as it is forlorn. "A lot of my favorite music-things like Cat Power, certain Keith Jarrett, Billie Holiday, Chris Whitley-makes me feel like being alone and being quiet," says Bartlett, "And that's what Doveman's music is. It's made for listening alone-definitely voice-inside-your-head music."
Bartlett's relationship with sad music goes way back-he first grasped its power when he found himself being asked to play piano at funerals as a teenager; the connection to the audience was as intimate as it was intense. Bartlett found that what he calls "the spectral melancholy thing" was what he does best and his gift is on vivid display on The Acrobat. "A lot of these are heartbroken, woe-is-me songs," Bartlett acknowledges, "and the overall tone of the record is pretty bleak. But that's not necessarily my state of mind-people who know me know that I'm a pretty happy person. I just like making sad music, I always have."
A classical piano prodigy, Bartlett played competitions and even dropped out of high school and moved to London to study with Maria Curcio, one of the world's top teachers. But he had no intention of becoming a classical musician. "I just loved the music," he says, "and wanted to play the piano as well as I could." He and childhood friend Sam Amidon co-founded the avant-folk group Popcorn Behavior (later known as Assembly) and released the first of four albums when Bartlett was 12. Bartlett moved to New York in 2000 to study literature at Columbia, and soon decided that he wanted to start writing songs. Only one problem: he didn't like to sing. "Music and words were the two things I liked most, and I wanted to combine them," he says, "so I had to get over my phobia." When he finally sang, his distinctive murmuring sigh is what came out.
Doveman was a name and a concept before it was a band. The name was what Amidon called Bartlett, inspired by a collage Bartlett's brother had made with his head stuck on the body of a dove. The concept was that two people in the band would closely follow the song's form, with the others free to improvise.
That approach involves a lot of trust and skill, and Amidon and Bartlett began to assemble an empathetic group of superlative downtown musicians including drummer Dougie Bowne (Lounge Lizards, Iggy Pop), Shahzad Ismaily (Brian Eno, Rage Against the Machine, the Boredoms), Jacob Danziger (Saturday Looks Good to Me, flashpapr, His Name Is Alive), and cornetist Peter Ecklund (Madeline Peyroux, Woody Allen, Loudon Wainwright III). "Sam and I have been best friends since we were five or six, and playing music since then," Bartlett says. "I don't have to think about playing with Sam. I trust his instincts so completely, and it's the same with everyone else in the band. I have complete faith that as long as they know the basic structure of the song, they can do whatever they want to do."
Playing with Bowne, a widely revered drummer and acclaimed producer, was a particular thrill, and one that still hasn't worn off. "Dougie was already one of my favorite drummers when I came to New York," Bartlett says. "Now he's one of my all-time musical heroes." Partly through his association with Bowne, Bartlett quickly became an in-demand keyboardist in New York, playing with the likes of Elysian Fields, Chocolate Genius, Mike Doughty, Miho Hatori (Cibo Matto) and many others.
Bartlett, Amidon and Bowne cut basic tracks for The Acrobat over two days in spring, 2004, in Manhattan with Grammy-winning engineer Pat Dillett (David Byrne, Mary J. Blige, Arto Lindsay), working quickly and trusting to spontaneity. Later, Danziger overdubbed violin and electronics, Bowne laid down guitar, Ecklund added cornet.
"Honey" opens the album, its gentle sway striking precisely the note of forlorn joy that defines The Acrobat. Yet for all the song's fragility, this is one sensitive guy who knows how to bite back: "I could die here in your arms," Bartlett practically whispers, "But I'm not sure you're worth the sacrifice." The band permits itself a jaunty swing on "Cities," with a dissonant splatter of a piano solo from Bartlett that threatens to unhinge the entire track, then ventures deep into the incantatory with the heavy groove of "Teacup." Perhaps the album's darkest point is "Drinking," a harrowing front-row seat to self-destruction. "That track," Bartlett says. "is as close to a true story as you get on this record."
The music's sense of desolation and loss finds its match in its recurring spiritual imagery: angels, floods, falls from grace, genuflecting, and the apocalypse all populate Doveman's songs. "Step inside this house/ There's room for all," Bartlett sings on "House," and it's hard not to envision a benevolent church that welcomes wounded souls. "Spirituality in music is tricky-and it's also totally what I'm after," Bartlett says. "It's just hard to talk about it."
"Dancing," the record's final song, brings to the fore the delicate filament of hope, as fragile as Bartlett's voice, that runs throughout "The Acrobat." It is a starry-eyed love song that is touched, it is almost needless to say, by a shadowy sense of melancholy. The song distills the potently strange and seemingly paradoxical emotion that runs throughout The Acrobat, a sense of uplift reached through sadness. As Bartlett sings on one song, "Crying is our way to smile."
Throughout, the members of Doveman take unfamiliar instruments, a limited range, fingers and hands that perhaps don't quite do what they used to, and through sheer force of will and a profound affinity for making music, build simple but delicate elements into intense, tremendously moving music that fairly shudders with subtle but seismic force. "You can make people hear the beauty in the simplest thing," says Bartlett, "if you concentrate on it hard enough."
-Michael Azerrad
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