On his eighth solo album, Escape from L.A., Matt Kivel presents a set of songs that, when experienced as a whole, form a widescreen picture and a reflection on a single deep subject. This is Kivel’s most autobiographical offering, but it is delivered with an impressionist’s hand. His connection to L.A. runs deep, having grown up in Santa Monica, shuttled along the 10, 101, and PCH. After first breaking out with the Eagle Rock indie band Princeton, who toured hard but inevitably burned out, he would re-emerge with stark, haunting solo records that won wide critical praise. This one, though, is a grander, deeper beast. The man himself has jokingly called it “bootleg as hell Blood On The Tracks’ but whereas Dylan would spend just a few sessions refining and then re-recording sections of his heart as an open book masterpiece, Kivel has been chipping away at ‘Escape From L.A.’ for the past nine years. It conjures images of an ambitious work slowly growing on its canvas at the corner of the studio, a piece too close to the surface for the artist to approach often. Undoubtedly, the desire to get it exactly right necessitated some careful attention to the creative process, and indeed, the element in which that Dylan comparison rings truest is the way the lyrical perspectives play with time. This is an album that lives in the present moment and drifts back for first-person perspectives on past events, reflecting on them with the benefit of hindsight.
Musically, the record opens in a gently introspective place. The track Santa Monica scattergun fires out memories of romantic moments (listening with a close companion to TLC on a beach, for example) and recollections of school days happenings, such as the cops shooting someone’s brother dead. This is played out to the sound of a light, shuffling beat, ghostly backing vocals, and a warm, Hawaiian-sounding guitar breezing by. Where initially we could be in a remote hideaway from urban life, the production on Tidal Wave feels like it has parachuted us straight onto the hot concrete of the city streets. There is an imposing, synthesised throb to the sound and an ominous echo in the atmosphere. A Little Mark cranks up the electric guitars and spins the senses into an environment that can only sharpen your edges. As far as the subject matter Kivel addresses, this is an individual’s memories that often intersperse with references that anyone with recent cultural and topical awareness will be familiar with. The L.A. riots and fall of the twin towers get a mention, but on more of a tangent, the song Robert Redford tells the story of Matt’s father being cast in the 1988 film ‘The Natural’ alongside the famous actor. Later, Vampire Weekend is indeed referencing the art rock combo, but from the angle of their sudden critical and commercial success occurring in tandem with the reverse fortunes of Matt’s first band around the same time. “We could have been Vampire Weekend. Ever get the sense you’re not wanted in some place you want to be?”
Happily, the time spent reworking, re-recording, and re-arranging these songs has resulted in an album that is extremely well crafted with many subtle layers waiting to be found. The notion of a cohesive song suite is reinforced with the closing number, Barbara’s Ocean. We hear a couple of minutes in conventional, lyrical song form that has an appropriate air of finality, but the piece then closes with a coda that runs to almost three minutes of resonant electronic sound. This could be either the rolling, waving presence of the ocean or the vibrating pulse of nearby urban life, but whatever the meaning, it evokes an overwhelming sense of indelible life and movement. There is a breathing presence that is never silent, always regenerating and moving ever onwards. It changes before your eyes as the touchstones and memories of a lifetime are washed into the city fabric, then either eroded or evolved. Matt Kivel has cleverly sketched some reflections of his own experiences into a far bigger narrative and successfully grasped the immersive enormity of the landscape around him. In carving a piece with such personal truth, he has made an album that should speak to a far wider world than from which it came.
Escape from L.A. is out now on Scissor Tail Records