DAUGHN GIBSON

            One of the most recent ways I realized I was old is that I now discover new music through NPR’s First Listen page, which I don’t imagine is like a *bad* thing or anything—maybe it’s got less to do with me being old as it’s got to do with the fact that the world of music is now so intermeshed that, well, a Jay-Z-produced soundtrack streams the week before it’s release on the website of the same media company which produces All Things Considered. Maybe all of this is old news and not worth much thinking about.

I’m frustrated to say that I missed Daughn Gibson when his debut All Hell dropped in April of 2012, but I’m glad to say that I’ve corrected for that mistake, and between trying to crack into more than just a few of the tracks on Yeezus and turning back again and again to the new Vampire Wknd and now easing into Hova’s MCHG, Gibson’s Me Moan is the thing I’ve been listening most to for a good while now, and it’s the best album on American Dark since last year’s Believers by A A Bondy.

Before anything else, below’s the first track of Me Moan, “The Sound of Law,” and, after that, the first track of Believers, “The Heart is Willing.”

I’ve never seen anyone use the term American Dark as a description for any musical genre, but it’s become clear of late that we actually need to start trying to establish and understand genres again. Take Jay-Z’s new album, which opens with “Holy Grail,” a track featuring a former boy-band leader crooning like Adam Levine (Timberlake’s voice could be almost anyone’s voice—it’s as close to featureless, at least on “Holy Grail,” as you could imagine), plus also a song featuring bits of the chorus to “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” a 20+ year old anticorporate and unlikely hit. What fucking genre features those elements? Is that still hip-hop? Is it still a hip-hop album if, on a later track, the progeny of a one-hit mulleted wonder is featured? On the one hand, it’s great that rap and hip hop are now so big and accepted that they can contain everything (though they sort of always did, hence sampling). But what’s the point of calling it hip hop if it’s got a little bit of everything? And how is what Jay-Z’s doing all that different from what Miley Cyrus or Justin Timberlake is doing, musically?

This is already getting out of hand. The point is: American Dark. I suppose the genre could be considered something like the continuing highway of music that stretches all the way back (Marcus’s Old, Weird America) and includes folks like Dylan and Townes, but has been, in the last decade plus, populated with folks like Califone, like Damien Jurado, etc. Who knows. Maybe it doesn’t much matter.

What very much does matter, however, is Daughn Gibson, and his Me Moan is strange and glorious and more than anything else totally weird and idiosyncratic: there’s almost a southern butt-rock feel to “Kissin on the Blacktop,” with its coiling low-picked guitar lines, but listen to “The Sound of Law,” again: there’s hints that the guy who made that could make “Kissin,” but it seems just as likely he’d head to darker woods. There are samples and loops going on here, same as on All Hell (I missed it, but I almost always catch up), and Gibson’s wide low rumble of a voice plays a line that I think is hard as hell to play: he can (of course) sound dead serious (as dudes who sound like they’ve got a twenty-story elevator shaft for a vocal chamber tend to), but he can also sound playful, loose, appealing to more than just the morose journaling set.

Here’s maybe another way to think about or consider the notion of American Dark as a genre: it’s weird music because it’s the work of one person, is the vision of one person. I like Jay-Z’s new one quite a bit, but it’s impossible not to hear it as the result of a whole lot of marketing and research—it’s music made for everyone. Whatever else people like Bondy or Gibson or Dylan or Van Zandt (or whoever: Richard Buckner’s on the list as well, Westerberg to a degree, maybe Chilton) have in common, it’s impossible to listen to their stuff and hear it as in any way compromised: it is agendaless music made for the sake of the listening. Anyway, Daughn Gibson: get on it pronto. Me Moan is out today from SubPop.