Falling in love with the concept album again

West of Roan give new (or old?) meaning to the word "lore."

View this email online July 14, 2024 by Ann Powers In an era when connecting the tidbits of an artist’s personal life can seem more important than following a musical thread between songs, a new album by West of Roan revives faith in the power of the concept album. Blake McMeekin/Courtesy of the artist Hello conjurers, I’ve been transported by a close-knit pair of voices this week, called by their verses and rhymes to another world. This has happened many times throughout my listening life, sometimes through the deliberate efforts of the artists whose music I’m absorbing, and sometimes with help from my own imagination. The lineage of the concept album is long, complicated and by necessity, not well codified; obvious examples like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon stand alongside more non-linear ones like The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld or Outkast’s Speakerboxx/The Love Below.  Concept albums adhere more or less closely to a plot depending on the genre they represent and their makers’ commitment to certain organizational principles. In jazz, classics like Charles Mingus’s Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (written as a ballet, with liner notes partly by the bass great’s psychotherapist) or Mary Lou Williams’s Black Christ of the Andes show their connective tissue musically more than lyrically. Country concept albums tend to unfold like campfire sagas, recasting tried-and-true stories — cowboys, the Civil War, small town life — in ways that reflect the eras in which they were produced. Taking up from where George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic collective touched down, hip-hop and science fiction have become fine bedfellows in Afrofuturist works as varied at Janelle Monaé’s The Archandroid and multiple releases from Shabazz Palaces and Kool Keith. Folk and rock musicians tend to aim their concepts at Broadway, with Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown and Green Day’s American Idiot showing others how it’s done. In 2024, though, the grounding promise of the concept album – that it can create a cosmos where a listener can travel, beyond the quick hits radio or streaming playlists offer — is challenged by the rise of a new kind of fiction: lore. That the main route to stardom now lies in constructing a public version of an artist’s private life is indisputable. Singles and albums play a part, but one that’s not necessarily more important than what appears on social media or is teased out in message boards. I don’t have to mention the names of the one percenters who have made chasing lore a main listening activity, but it’s the strategy of most rising artists now, too. Is The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess a concept album? How about Brat? Well, why not?  That a fan must be invested in the actual loves, rivalries and ambitions of an artist is nothing new — celebrity is an old interface, constantly updating — but that songs may be relatively indecipherable without that extra work is new, and sometimes exhausting. Personally, I’m very aware that I don’t know most of my favorite pop musicians as people, and I like it that way; I don’t want to be told why or how to care about their work. And I’m extra delighted now when I happen upon a conceptually driven album that relies on its creators’ willingness to sink beneath the surface of the world the music establishes. I enjoy the spaciousness of such endeavors, and their magnetism. They let me float on a foreign sea for a while.  I thought about these things as I played Queen of Eyes, the second album by the folk duo West of Roan, on repeat. Annie Schermer and Channing Showalter, also part of the freak-folk foursome Doran, realize the potential of the concept album on multiple levels. First, there is method. Writing original songs that quilt together stories from many different origin points, Schermer and Showalter seek the commonalities among legends, myths and folktales from diverse spots on the globe: their ancestors’ homelands in Northern Europe, but also the world’s oldest-known myths, from Sumer in what is now south-central Iraq, and batonebo songs originating in Georgia, in the Caucasus mountains, sung by mothers to ill children to rid them of the demons afflicting them. Composing solo or together, they bring these haunting tunes to each other as gifts. Though their formal training takes them out of the category of “outsider artists,” Schermer and Showalter beautifully honor a central aspect of folk art: the blend of far-flung stories and sources and idiosyncratic, internal insights. Then there’s how they recorded this album: In their remote, off-grid cabin off the coast of Washington State, they sat close together on a piano bench, singing into an Ear Trumpet condenser microphone designed to capture room noise and breathing as well as the notes they gently spilled forth.  The intimacy of this process privileges the body and the heart over the head in some ways. Queen of Eyes doesn’t tell one story; it’s more like a volume of collected tales, evoking a universe and allowing listeners to make their own paths through it. Schermer and Showalter are also puppeteers, and the numinous quality of their recordings brings to mind the uncanny bodies of these humanly animated dolls, which when handled most gracefully seem to live beyond the machinations of the people who manipulate them. Queen of Eyes abounds with semi-human, semi-supernatural characters, figments of Schermer and Showalter’s imagination, grounded in experience, but unrecognizable as their alter egos. Their female bodies become fish, become water; sometimes they intertwine with the dead, or are them. The singers imagine themselves merging with these creatures and being renewed. She eats my body every time, it’s the only way I come back alive, they intone in the album’s title track. On her waist she wears a silver key and my ribs meet to make a door. Again and again, the individual connects with something or someone more dynamic and fluid than herself. And that is how she grows. West of Roan is hardly the first contemporary group to mine folk and fairy tales for their rich material. The Decemberists, who recently released another epic in As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again, dazzled mid-2000s indie rock fans with their song suites The Crane Wife and The Hazards of Love. Anna and Elizabeth — a duo whose Elizabeth LaPrelle is also part of Doran — also use animating props (in their case, proto-cinematic crankies, which West of Roan also sometimes employ) to cultivate the magical. With her novel-in-verse Orlan and album I Inside the Old Year Dying, the ever-shapeshifting PJ Harvey also found a fertile concept in this space. What I find most valuable about Queen of Eyes is the way its makers become translucent within the music. Though one traditional song appears on the album — the familiar yet novel feminist origin story “Let No One Steal Your Thyme” — this is music that disappears its makers within the mists of tradition. It is strange and intimate. You can feel Schermer and Showalter’s breath. Yet there’s no au courant assertion of ego, no need to claim lore in the here and now. I would call this music timeless, but that cheapens its effect, too: It’s more time-spanning, time-bending, reflecting a present teeming with elements of the past. Newsletter continues after sponsor message FROM NPR MUSIC THIS WEEK: The cast of the newest Broadway revival of The Wiz briefly turned the Tiny Desk into Emerald City, performing a handful of hits from the musical, which goes back on tour in the beginning of 2025.  Alt.Latino’s latest episode collecting Anamaria Sayre and Felix Contreras’ favorite new music features songs by the R&B singer Omar Apollo and the trombonist Papo Vazquez, as well as a breakdown of the controversy surrounding Colombian pop star Karol G’s new hit (which happens to sound a lot like a certain Rosalía track.) 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