Liberation! by Peter Matthew Bauer (review)

 Back in 2014, I wrote about a dozen album reviews for a website called Buzz and Howl, which was subsequently hacked and disappeared into the ether. This is the third in a series of posts intended to preserve that work, unedited.

Peter Matthew Bauer, Liberation!

After a decade and a half as a sideman in the Walkmen, Peter Matthew Bauer has released his solo debut, trading his bass and organ for a guitar and a microphone. Just reading through the track titles gives you an indication of the world- and culture-hopping exoticism Bauer hopes to impart with the album. “Philadelphia Raga,” “Istanbul Field Recording,” and “Irish Wake in Varanasi” are the three most blatant place-name dropping titles. But almost every other title here gestures towards the elements of Eastern religion associated with psychedelic rock ever since Brian Jones picked up a sitar and the Beatles spent a few months meditating with the Maharishi: “I Was Born in an Ashram,” “Shiva the Destroyer,” the Hare Krishna-taunting “Shaved Heads & Pony Tails.” Even “Fortune Tellers,” “Scientology Airplane Conversations,” and “You are the Chapel” are titles that deploy signifiers of spiritual alternatives to Western organized religion. And the album is called Liberation!.

The title track has a wide-eyed and exuberant Paul Simon-y vibe. If it had been recorded thirty years ago, it probably already would have made it onto a Wes Anderson soundtrack. Paul Simon and Wes Anderson are two white American guys that have been accused of exploiting foreign cultures to bring a little something exotic into their art. Simon’s album Graceland, which he recorded in South Africa, was controversial for many political reasons related to Apartheid and the cultural boycott surrounding it, but it also struck some people as distasteful that he had written new lyrics to the melody of a traditional Zulu wedding song and, in one instance, sang right over the top of a local band’s instrumental (The Boyoyo Boys, “Gumboots”). And Wes Anderson seemed unaware that his film The Darjeeling Limited was a portrait of Ugly Americans running roughshod through India. The film itself seems uncritical of the way its characters appropriate surface aspects of local religious practices without attempting to understand their meanings.

 To my ears, Liberation! avoids any such ethical complications. It is, instead, one man’s attempt to reckon with the legacy of the spiritual culture he was raised in and the world he now finds himself in. And maybe how the two relate. Bauer sings, “You’ve got a lot to answer for,” and later, with repetition and emphasis, “Let’s leave it behind!” on the opening track, “I Was Born in Ashram.” He has said that the lyrics are about teenage summers spent living in an ashram: “...[A] lot of unsavory business rose up around the ashram, so some of the songs relate to that… all this negative stuff arises, and yet, so many of these people are having these very strange, authentic spiritual experiences.”

Other tracks simply reflect the world-hopping a longtime member of a touring rock band is likely to have done. “Istanbul Field Recording” very well may be one: as a lo-fi presentation of a solo piano piece, it sounds unlike anything else on the record, giving us a nice resting place for a few minutes before the last leg of the record launches into being with another big, optimistic tune. It also reflects back to another meditative moment, earlier in the record. “Philadelphia Raga” begins with over a minute and a half of quiet, solo acoustic guitar, before a song, driven by a strummed acoustic, fades almost imperceptibly into being. The album is full of nice musical touches like this, and--along with the depth of experience being worked through lyrically--makes it a set of songs you’ll be continue to be surprised and enriched by each time you revisit them. Buy this record: it makes you feel good to listen to it.