Herman Dune – Notes from Vinegar Hill
B B * Island – 6 November 2020
In one sense, Notes From Vinegar Hill is an old-fashioned album. That is not meant to be disparaging. On the contrary, it’s refreshing to hear a collection of songs this sincere and wry and personal. These varied vignettes are tied to a specific locale, but at no point do they come across as pretentious. Everything seems perfectly tied together, but there is nothing overly conceptual going on. The songs, witty and wide-ranging and full of nods and winks to the golden age of west-coast songwriting, always take precedence. Think a combination of The Band’s Music From Big Pink and Dennis Wilson’s Pacific Ocean Blue but with a whole bunch of on-point contemporary cultural references.
And contemporary is an important word here. This may be French-Swedish songwriter David Ivar’s fourteenth album under the Herman Dune name, but he has never sounded so relevant. Notes From Vinegar Hill grew out of a period of introspection, its creator (like everyone else) looking for a way to survive the first months of Covid-19. In the end, he did more than see out that initial period of lockdown: he chronicled it brilliantly. And despite the fraught nature of the world in which he recorded it, and the part-bizarre, part-banal Los Angeles surroundings which give the album its distinct sense of place, there are moments when these songs are just plain fun.
Take the glammy, rootsy rocker Mookie Mookie, which is simple but extremely effective, and punctuated with some beautifully messy guitar. It sounds like T-Rex if Bolan had been born in South California instead of North London. Ballad Of Herman Dune takes delight in its references, from The Basement Tapes to Uber via Snoop Dogg, all set against the hyper-real backdrop of Long Beach.
But for the most part this record tackles the weirder and more difficult effects of a lockdown: the way isolation can heighten or deaden feelings. Freak Out Til The Morning Dew encapsulates the anxiety that accompanies insomnia, while the upbeat country strum of Birds Of Prey hides a stark message about human transience. PS I Could Have Done Great Things embodies the kind of self-deprecating humour perfected by Leonard Cohen (and the album cover’s blocky typeface and monochrome photo also looks like a nod to Cohen’s Songs Of Love And Hate). LA Blues, the record’s most downbeat moment, is the lament of a man who has found himself in the most demanding of foreign countries, at one of the most demanding times in that country’s history. Its delicate guitar solos and wash of backing vocals are almost narcotic in their calmative effect.
There are moments of real sweetness too. Vinegar Hill is an upbeat duet in the style of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris or Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra, opening song Say You Love Me Too channels the energy of Nashville Skyline-era Dylan, Heartbroken And Free splices Ivar’s rough-around-the-edges voice to a melody that could have come from the first half of the twentieth century, and Scorpio Rising, an album highlight, finds some kind of solace in the ocean.
Herman Dune has always been difficult to pin down. Is it a band or a solo project? A confessional songwriter or an invented character? Anti-folk or classic rock? It’s possible to be all of these things at once, particularly in a place as multifaceted as LA and in a time as fragmented as the one we are living through. And the breadth and variety of Notes From Vinegar Hill suggest that David Ivar has succeeded: he has made a record that sounds on first listen like it could have been recorded at any point in the last fifty years, but in reality is uniquely and intelligently current, an album of the year in every sense.
Notes from Vinegar Hill is out now
Order via: Amazon | Piccadilly Records | BB*Island
Stream: https://idol.lnk.to/NFVH