Danielson: Trying Hartz
By Kate Orazem /// published in the December 2008 issue
David Maisel’s Library of Dust is a series of photos depicting copper canisters, each containing the cremains of patients from state-run psychiatric hospitals whose bodies went unclaimed by their families. Avant-garde theater troupe Implied Violence has put on shows in the remnants of a warehouse which, during the 1840s, employed children as young as five. The performance is comprised entirely of actors dressed in adult diapers diving over and over into a large pile of sod.
Today’s art scene is as addicted to context as its predecessors were to cocaine and Dunhills. I’m not entirely opposed to opacity, but when the wall placards or explanatory programs are not only beneficial but essential to comprehension, that hoary old creative admonition to “show, not tell” has been violated.
That challenge has beset Danielson from its inception in 1994 as — surprise! — a senior art thesis. Daniel Smith, having left his large, musical, deeply religious family to go to college, decided to conclude his schooling by inviting his siblings up to sing Christian gospel tunes, albeit ones heavily colored by his love for Sonic Youth and Pere Ubu. The resulting band’s first record, A Prayer for Every Hour, sounds today like Devendra Banhart’s toothless evangelical grandpappy crooning praise poems daubed in barbecue sauce on cocktail napkins. Freak folk owes a lot to this apple-cheeked brood, some of whom were barely teenagers at the time of Prayer’s release.
Equally fascinating is the fact that Danielson turns assumptions about Christian music right on their red-horned heads; this is worship-song at its most poetic, ecstatic, and genuine, even if most people on first listen wouldn’t pick up on the sincere religion behind all that slap-happy indie love.
Danielson’s latest release, Trying Hartz, is a whistle-stop tour of this family-band’s first decade of development. The two-disc compilation samples from their first six albums, all of which were made with the sibling music-making team intact; it excludes Ships, Smith’s 2006 solo coup. At first glance, passing over an artist’s crowning achievement in a best-of record seems like the worst greatest-hits-related decision since Hilary Duff’s Most Wanted, but Ships’ relative prominence (and preeminence) when compared to the rest of the Danielson catalog makes the omission a wise decision. Including songs from Ships in this release would be a bit like taking just the spoonful of sugar, no medicine. After all, a brief rifle through Danielson’s older work reveals an oevre worthy of a beach-combing metal detector enthusiast — you’re going to have to wade through a lot of trash, and get a lot of stares, before you find that diamond ring.
That’s not to say that there’s not some quality here. The tracks that work have all the jubilance and cleverness of Smith’s best work. Consider the chameleonic “Jersey Loverboy,” tense with jingle bells and sexual repression; the meditative loveliness of “Daughters Will Tune You”; the spare, elegant imagery of “Smooth Death,” with its winking snippit of Chopin’s funeral march played on what sounds like a detuned harpsichord. Still, most of the tracks bear all the worst hallmarks of pre-Ships Danielson: moralistic lyrics, a sense of melody teetering just this side of the Children’s Music aisle, and some of the most irritating falsetto ever put to vinyl. More than half of the album plays like the background music at some Montessori for kids already deeply into the Flaming Lips and Johnathan Safran Foer. One of the worst offenders is a live version of “Don’t You Be the Judge,” in which Smith invites audience members to improvise verses; they oblige, to skin-crawling effect. Equally cringe-worthy is “Rubbernecker,” off the 1998 album Tri-Danielson!!! (Alpha). The track features Smith family shout-outs (“Go, Joe!”) punctuated by a flabby tuba bassline and cooing chorus of “Shame, shame, shame!”
Ultimately, success or failure of Trying Hartz can be seen as a test of backstory vs. quality; though these songs are richer in both filial and spiritual piety than Smith’s solo efforts, they sag compared to the taut art-prog of Ships. Stripped of its pretty underpinnings, art has to be able to stand; otherwise, we’re left with nothing but pictures of old cans and some grimy new friends in Depends.
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