Nickel Creek is not the easiest bunch to figure out. Their latest album leaves several questions which are difficult to justify. Like, can one of the best up and coming folk acts hail from Southern California? Can you really play bluegrass in a turtleneck? And maybe most importantly can this small band along with producer Alison Krauss create the best album of 2002, without the hint of a single use of percussion? Well, I would say the answer to all of these questions would be an emphatic maybe so. The latest offering from this still independent San Diegan band This Side is thoughtful, captivating, and what many fans will consider a departure. But this trio has sure offered up something wonderful in lieu of experimentation. The album leaves you at first listen with a few instantly delightful numbers that grab at your heart from the start, and the rest which grow on you more and more with each progressive listen until the entire album is an incredible experience. This album strongly backs up the claim Time magazine made of Nickel Creek as one of the five musical innovators for the millennium.
The opening moments of the album in the instrumental jam smoothie song show Nickel Creek sounding like the Dixie Chicks at their best and most pure. The mandolin is as rocking and accessible as it gets in modern pop music. The mandolin is one of the underused instruments today, and Chris Thile has done a great job showing off the amazing sound of this instrument. There are moments in the album where if you took everything away except the mandolin, the music would still be amazing. This pattern continues in the mandolin led "Spit on a Stranger," with background vocals good enough to add power pop to the musical influences on this album, and a little unexpected pleasant processed mandolin riff poking its head in every so often. Chris, the would be teen idol (maybe only if he wouldn't insist on carrying that little mandolin around everywhere he goes or wearing nothing but turtle necks), sings at the end "I'll be the one that leaves you high, high, high" trailing off into a falsetto that's sure to leave all of those girls with good musical taste swooning.
"Speak" puts the mandolin in a backseat, to the guitar taking the lead. The mandolin plays out like it has a mind of its own, yet not straying far from the song, taking the front seat periodically. This effect is captivating, and forms a beautiful foundation for the beautiful duo vocals from Sean and Sara Watkins. The next offering, "Hanging By a Thread" is at first glance seemingly a bit sappy, but grabs you with Chris/Sean's passionate vocals and of course the mandolin. The song is a desperate love song lamenting, "There's a cold and darker side of the moonlight/ there's a lonely side of love." Following is the jazz influenced "I Should've Known Better," one of the many standout favorites from the album. The song, a bitter lament over a love gone wrong, is bluegrass tinged with jazz, a bluesy rhythm, and what sounds like the string players from The Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" shot 40 years in the future, popping up at random times in the song. The song also contains, you guessed it, a dead on mandolin solo, some pet sounds studio techniques, and eerie strong background vocals from Sean and Chris. Yes it's good. Very good.
The next song is the highlight and a perfect world's Record of the Year. The title track "This Side" is about one of the best songs you can listen to driving down a back road, during a cool fall day. We find Sean Watkins taking an unusual lead vocal position on the song, prompting me to want to see more of this role from him in the future. The song is generally, as far as I can surmise, about taking a second shot at something you have failed at, yet feeling more at home than ever. The hopeful refrain goes:
Your first dawn blinded you, left you cursing the day.
Entrance is crucial and it's not without pain.
There's no path to follow, once you're here.
You'll climb up the slide and then you'll slide down the stairs.
It's foreign on this side,
But it feels like I'm home again.
There's no place to hide
But I don't think I'm scared.
Up next is the song "Green and Gray," another aching love song from Chris with another great string section, and a few of the many great lines contained on this album.
With another hotel room where he lays awake to pretend that he's doing fine with his notebook and discman for friends & I want you to love me, he whispers, unable to speak. And he wonders aloud why feelings so strong make the body so weak.
The album also contains a beautiful traditional folk song entitled "House Carpenter" with a very powerful story. This song allegorizes Satan in the story of a fair suitor from a far away land who could have married the King's daughter, yet offers this carpenter's wife his love and his riches. The carpenter's wife is whisked away by sea to the far away land, yet cries at her folly. The suitor asking her:
Or are you weeping, for your house carpenter
Whose face you'll never see no more?
The woman replies that she is not weeping for any of these, but for her little baby whom she has left and will never see again. The song ends with the line:
They had not been on the ship three weeks
I'm sure it was not four
When there came a leak, in the bottom of the ship
And sank them for to rise no more.
The song "Beauty and the Mess" puts Nickel Creek at their vocal best. The song is self descriptive in its beauty and chaos reigning in its creative use of violin, mandolin, and guitar, along with increasingly chaotic mixed vocals. This song shows a parallel between the strength Nickel Creek shares with Caedmon's Call, a great tool in the presence of three strong vocalists. The song "Young" has Chris once again pining for love:
Young and with no clue
And I wanna love you
Give me the key to what it's about.
This song has Chris trading off from soft and soaring vocals, transitioning artfully between normal singing and screaming, with the presence of great instrumental solos and perfect background vocals. The album ends on the eerie "Brand New Sidewalk," boiling down to a simple guitar with occasional mandolin riff and Chris on vocals. The song seems to be a sad one about the echoes and ghosts of the past, yet builds to a triumphant happy ending to the album as Chris declares:
Thank God you hate to listen
Cause I would not be here
Lifting the veil to kiss you
Next to a brand new sidewalk
This Side is simply a spectacular album. The production by Alison Krauss shows her amazing creativity throughout the album, (It seems she has picked up a few tricks working with T-Bone Burnett on Oh Brother Where Art Thou?) and deserves a producer of the year Grammy nomination. Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has found its first and most competent contender as the best album for 2002.
4.5 tocks
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