Little Wings, Magic Wand, released August 2004, K records on LP and CD
Sixth release.
Ah, how to explain the love-fest that is Kyle Field’s Little Wings? I was “indoctrinated” at a small in-store performance back at Buffalo Records in Santa Barbara, CA, when Kyle hit the road promoting “Light Green Leaves.” I was instantly entranced by Kyle’s childlike sincerity. In that packed room, he was exuberant; whirling and jumping higher and higher while attempting to play, song bleeding into song, guitar held high above his head or behind his back in ecstatic jubilation. His energy was infectious and built a community around his songs in a way similar to John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Montreal bed-in of 1969.
The next time I saw Kyle he was stumbling out of his Volvo in front of a beach house in Isla Vista, playing to a small gathering. Seated cross-legged in a living room, he was the Maestro of a musical sleepover. He impishly convinced the party to move to the bluffs above the sea and played sketchy and spontaneous songs, still largely ideas traced in his notebook, splayed open under the small oval of lantern light. He encompassed, for me, a certain integrity; lacking pretension, wistful, less concerned with “getting it right” than with the experience and joy of playing.
And his recordings have always kept that experience alive in their lo-fi folksiness. His five prior releases for K records retained the spontaneity of his performances by offering several different versions of the same songs on a trilogy of formats. His material remained unfixed and flexible; organic and alive because of this. And it is in allowing this organic life of songs that Kyle Fields excels. “Magic Wand” his sixth release, continues the cyclical life of his material with fruitful mutations and musical migrations that lend a weight to melodies both old and new.
What I mean when I say his music is cyclical is just that his recordings have always had a seasonal feel to them, like they were marking a passing of time; “Harvest Joy” evoked an autumnal mood, while the lilting “Light Green Leaves” seemed to trace the halcyon days of summer’s last light. “Magic Wand” seems to follow suite. This latest recording is also autumnal, but it’s not the fall of “Harvest Joy”, not the rushing winds, the frenetic energy or bravura. It’s a more seasoned fall; brooding and melancholy; the last remaining leaves still clinging to branches, nearly stripped bare and silent. Pared down in this way, the lyrics and melodies are re-emphasized, giving the listener a fresh experience of the music. The twelve songs that comprise “Magic Wand” are, in a sense, united by their reprisals and ravages of previously released material.
Recorded at Calvin Johnson’s Dub Narcotic studio in Olympia, WA for K Records/Beat Happenings, Fields spent one week in sessions during which musician friends migrated through to record for a few days, a night, or just a song. “Magic Wand” traces these fluxes of musical collaborations and bears the presence of Fields’ friends and relations; Phil and Genevieve Elverum, Dub Narcotic’s Chris Sutton, Adam Forkner, Zach Riles, Bobby Birdman, Lee Baggett, Miggy Littleton, as well as friends from The Graves, Lyerbird, and Peace Harbor. The melodies of “Light Green Leaves” do not rest, they circulate, waiver, and shift in their various permutations, through changes in instrumentation, lyrics, musicians, arrangements, and tone. Though “Magic Wand” lacks the frolicsome playfulness of Fields’ last release, it is, in a sense an elegy to that romping freedom. As Fields plays with the memory and traces of his material, reworking melodies and lyrics, “Magic Wand” pulls the listener in to an exploration of his songs’ mutability and the open expansiveness of change.
The opening track of “Magic Wand,” Everybody, is a perfect example of this. First released on Light “Green Leaves”, it was celebrational in tone. On “Magic Wand,” it begins with abrupt vocals with guitar in muted accompaniment. The arrangement is almost melancholic in tone while the lyrics provide a loose theme to “Magic Wand,” an invocation or incantation of sorts as Fields voice, soft and confessional sings“ if I am to break the spell of change/ and so to duly rearrange/the faces that you’ve seen before/and let the will of absence pour/gravity will keep you near/ in silent times that are so clear/you may never see them but/ realize everything can be them.” Harmonizing vocals echo a slight step behind Fields’ lyrics and suggest something of a dissipation or decay that promises but defers rejuvenation.
The second track, “Whale Mountain,” is a “new” song that takes the melodies of “The Shredder” and “Everybody” and puts them to the brooding piano accompaniment of Elverum. Even with new lyrics there is the same nostalgia for the past as the song finds its moorings in a recollection of memory traces. Fields’ lyrics admonish the listener to “Put the past behind you,” an interesting challenge as the new material of “Magic Wand” gives a not so furtive backward glance to all these past releases. On the next track,“So What”, the melody again reprises earlier works but is even slower and more autumnal, turning and churning and stripping itself down tenderly. The crashes and subtle surges of high hat, cymbals and piano are mimetic of the churlish Washington coast-line, It’s a sweetly saturnine ballad to evening and receding tides.
There is some new material that seems only thematically reminiscent of prior works. “Sing Wide” starts with jangling guitar. As the drum slaps in and vocals swell, a quiet contemplative mood still prevails. The crashing drums create a dissonance with the vocals as Kyle crows, “music brings me back to life, if I can sing there is no strife.’ The instrumentals build into a growing tension that swells and then suddenly drops off, precipice-like into silence; the song’s end even more intensified and definite because of this.
“Magic Wand,” the title track with its slide guitar and echo effects is a haunting melody that acts as a thematic reprisal to what had come before, while “Hanto Yo Three,” a beautiful ballad with calypso like percussion and guitar plucking, is a bit more uplifting in tone. As drums slap and guitars lilt, the lyrics are more hopeful with their Beatle like reminder “ I do admit it’s getting better all the time.” The album’s tone dips again as “Random Lee” offers soft lulling harmonies with gentle guitar strumming and has a twilit feel to its quiet ebbing. “Darkened Car,” the final track, begins with the same abrupt vocals as “Everybody” but brings the album to its thematic close, suggesting that the memory of this music will remain after the song is finished; “If in time we don’t speak anymore, you’ll still feel me outside your door”
“Magic Wand,” for all its weight, is Kyle Fields’ alluvial harvesting of past works. The impish songster shows us that his levity can be grounded. On this release, he’s less the puckish magician, not the Mickey Mouse -Broomsticks’ fantasia that was “Light Green Leaves.” There is still magic there, but it’s far more saturnine in nature, more Crowley than Copperfield. “Magic Wand” suggests the moments when the alchemy is spent and the residue in the crucible, what remains, is weighted, brooding. The album offers both the transcendent and the transitory nature of Little Wings’ music without taking either of these too seriously. Lo-fi folk fans, even if you haven’t had the chance to see Kyle in all his performative glory, pick it up and give it a listen. |