Heartless Bastards – A Beautiful Life
Sweet Unknown Records/Thirty Tigers – 10 September 2021
Fronted by Erika Wennerstrom, at times sounding like a less raspy Lucinda Williams, although she made her solo debut in 2019, this is Cincinnati’s Heartless Bastards‘ first album in six years. The line-up comprises Okkervil River guitarist Lauren Gurgiolo, drummer Greggory Clifford from White Denim, Midlake multi-instrumentalist Jesse Chandler, My Morning Jacket’s keyboardist Bo Koster, sometime Patty Griffin guitarist David Pulkingham and longstanding bassist Jesse Ebaugh.
It’s an eclectic affair, taking in everything from French pop and Celtic folk to Disney scores and post-punk, opening with the six-minute, initially sparse acoustic but gradually building blues Revolution. The song is a social commentary on changing times, from one “filled with hope” instead of fear with its fake news and everyone “Constantly being advertised, your life commercialized and disguised/ As happiness in pills and potions fancy threads and cars in motion/Hypnotized by gilded lies to line the pockets of so few./While hungry politicians feed bullshit to the masses”, a call to let your voice be heard in protest “and speak your mind”.
The call for unity to tackle the world’s problems (“People can we get together and help each other out/The temperature is rising/Oh the world is filled with so much greed”) is echoed in the rockier pop inflections of How Low, the recurring musical motif of which recalls Cast Your Fate To The Wind, as she asks “how low will you go to get to the top?”) before tinkling piano sets the scene for the timpani thumps and descending chords of the Disney-styled When I Was Younger about recapturing that optimism and innocence (“my heart it sings to mend the strings my spirit has awoken”).
That new dawn, and embarking on self-liberation notion, is there too on the twangsome guitar, and pizzicato strings carrying the potential romance in the 60s flavoured You Never Know (“…unless you let yourself see/You never know unless you open up your eyes”), while the similarly themed (“like a newborn baby/I will begin again/And I open up my arms wide and I’m not holding on/Free to be me beautiful and strong”) dreamily soulful A Beautiful Life basks in the SoCal sunshine as they tap into a meld of Richard Carpenter and Marvin Gaye.
Featuring contributions from Andrew Bird on violin and Persian setar virtuoso Fared Shafinury, the latter anchoring the lengthy intro and outro, The River traces the same current (“You have to let go to be free/I had to break free/I had to break free/And just go with the flow”) in a suitably rambling manner.
Things get noisier, more strident and rockier with Photograph, but never lose sight of the importance of a catchy melodic hook (it’s as if Jefferson Airplane and The Bangles had a love child), the call to action lyrics echoing the sentiments of the album opener (“Let’s build an army and fight fear with love”), then calm down again for the acoustic shimmer of the introspective slow sway Dust (“I’ve been sleeping deep underneath the willow tree/It’s time to wake up It’s almost dawn/I realize I don’t know anything at all/Oh my world it was so very small/I’m just a tiny speck of dust amongst it all”) that, once more, flies the flag of universality (“we are one/We’re all going down a path that is unknown/We’re all just flowing from the same old stream”).
A syncopated drum pattern, occasional icy piano frills and orchestral string flourishes underpin Went Around The World (“I ain’t got no time for worry/I’ll just be here living in the moment”), which feels like a slow, narcotic Blondie shuffle, the album ending with more shuffle ‘n’ sway 70s dream pop in Doesn’t Matter Now (“If at first you don’t succeed try try again/You just gotta let love, let love in”) featuring flute and clarinet and, finally, presumably not a nod to Rodin, ruminative lengthy closing cosmic ambience track The Thinker that gathers together the love is all you need through the line and (mentioning Phoenix in both a geographical and metaphorical sense) the theme of reawakening and rebirth (“I walked for days, and shed my skin”) as she sings “The only thing I want to rule is myself” and the wisdom “Don’t worry about material things/In the end there’s nothing they bring”.
It may be something of a thematic throwback to the heady, hippie days of the summer of love, but that doesn’t undercut either its message or its melodies, a reminder that it’s a beautiful life, one that deserves to be lived and celebrated.