Having been introduced by a friend to A Crow Looked At Me after mentioning Donuts, I’ve since come to see many conceptual similarities between the two albums even as they’re musically very different.
A bit of a background to both albums: They’re heavily concerned about death. Crow was written by Phil Elverum following the death of his wife, the musician and illustrator Geneviève Castrée. The majority of Donuts was produced by J Dilla on his deathbed with a tape recorder while in hospital. They both are deeply reflective on death and loss: what it means to communicate with, and from, those beyond the grave. How short and fleeting life is. Both musicians have had well-recognized and illustrious careers, but this is not a run-of-the-mill project, if it’s fair to describe any of their works as such. Rather, they gain so much significance placed in their context, and they are amongst some of the most emotional albums I’ve heard.
Crow is a sonically simple album: acoustic songs, with just his voice. The guitar is calming, and you can tell Elverum is comfortable on it- a bit more surprising, a bit more sorrowful when you learn it belonged to his wife, with the entire album recorded in the bedroom she died. It’s melodious, but gives enough space for you to focus on the lyrics. Occasionally there are snatches of piano and percussion, used to great effect: see When I Take Out the Garbage At Night, and Toothbrush/Trash. Donuts on the other hand, is one of the postmodern masterpieces of instrumental hip-hop, one of those albums that would be second to none even scrubbed of context. Tracks from a variety of genres, of varying obscurities, are plucked and transformed into entirely new songs, short but richly textured. They are often short, around two minutes, but bursting with energy. A cheeky rib on classic riffs, jazz samples against more modern drum samples, record scratches: this album has anything, and is one of the few albums I’ll describe as timeless in its genre.
But to speak purely in terms of their soundscape ignores how these two works form deeply personal, emotional accounts. On Crows, it’s not always apparent who Elverum is addressing to. There’s a lot he wants to share with a listener- sometimes to his wife, sometimes just to space. It’s the act of reflecting that gives the album a sense of mourning, in how the most ordinary of moments- taking out the trash, closing the window of their bedroom, triggers memories and emotions. Plainly delivered, you get little glimpses into a relationship that was- and now must live on in a different way. These thoughts meander, entering familiar and distant spaces, all as he is aware that of the backdrop of time. It bulldozes, it separates, it strains memories. Along with death, these two forces of nature hang heavily over Elverum’s thoughts, and all our lives. “We are always so close, to not existing at all/ except in the confusion of our survived-bys grasping at the echoes”. If there is a line that encapsulates the spirit of the album, painfully aware of mortality and the senselessness of grief, this is it.
J Dilla speaks to us without words, his voice appearing on the album not even once. Instead, he relies on vocal samples to complement the instruments he too can no longer play from the hospital bed: these are often transplanted away from their original meaning and contexts, forming a self-aware, playfully bricolage. “Is death real?”, Dilla – alongside Jadakiss, and countless other artists surely – ponders, as the track Stop begins. Only now to borrow Dionne Warwick’s voice, proclaiming “You’re gonna want me back, you’re gonna need me one day”. On Waves Dilla is more defiant: scratching away the ‘don’t’ to leave the track with a message constantly imploring a “Johnny, do it”. His brother is cajoled to carry on J Dilla’s legacy, one of the many final wishes of Dilla as the album unfolds. The back to back tracks Gobstopper and One For Ghost sample the same track, “To the Other Man” by Luther Ingram, but invoke vastly different emotions. No words on the former, just the blaring of triumphant horns, while Ghost seems to allude to his childhood, the single sentence sampled cut and looped. Finally, as the album, draws to a close, Dilla bids a farewell with Bye and Last Donut of the Night. It’s almost impossible to pinpoint a feel to the two tracks: echoey, melodic and sounding like tributes he makes to himself, a final sendoff before the metaphorical fade into the night. It ends on “Welcome to the Show”: perhaps like the deliberate, flawless and purposeful loops that characterize J Dilla’s production, life has a circular element to it. The album ends on the same note that opens the entire album, an infinite that exposes the finite.
In a way, I’m surprised that Crows was released at all. It’s deeply personal, and at certain times it’s a bit uncomfortable, almost voyueristic when a memory that surely was significant only to the two of them is relived. the illustrative penultimate track Soria Moria. But interspersed with ominous thoughts, “Are you dreaming about a crow?”, he asks his child, perhaps this album’s also an act of catharsis, and of reflection. Empty as many spaces in his life are, what’s left to do is to live, to wonder, and to cope. And this time’s now been preserved in artistic form, an inherently obscured snapshot of moments from 2017 and beyond. J Dilla, too, struggles with mortality: even in the face of the inevitable, he remains faithful to his craft. His tracks are imbued with an irreverence, yet one that reminds us of a death that creeps closer. His samples may be from genre classics or tracks of the past, but it’s his transformation and tweaking of these sounds that lends a track an air of transcendence. With or without words these albums speak to us, offering us imperfect, temporally-constrained insight into something fundamentally unknown. Pure art.
Photo Credits: By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53297286; By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15986438
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