Earthside Down

Description

Earthside Down is the sophomore full-length album by the American singer and songwriter Robert Deeble, released on Jackson Rubio in 1998. The album features the production work of Anthony Arvizu and Stephen Hodges (drummer with Tom Waits and Mavis Staples). The album augmented Deeble’s spare sound with cellos, timpani, gongs, and electronic elements, all which treaded a line between folk and ambient music.

Stripped-down; naked save a delicate drapery of sparse instrumentation – the compositions that comprise Earthside Down balance zenlike simplicity in arrangement with strange, dark complexities in texture, time and lyric. The beautiful/awkward transparency of acoustic guitar, percussion and cello keep the listener at arm’s length with tones that ride the fence between occidental and oriental, until the melodic whisper of songwriter Robert Deeble invites the ears closer for self-revelation. (Fitting, then, that the project’s CD booklet should be printed upon layered sheets of translucent vellum – as the onionskin booklet is splayed and read, subsequent pages reveal deeper layers until ultimately the artist’s portrait is revealed on the final page of the book. A nice parallel metaphor for my first and subsequent listenings of this noteworthy project.)

Earthside Down is welcoming in that it is not overproduced, nor does it smack of demo project. The minimalist arrangements, vocals, lyrics, production value and packaging all seem cut from a unified artistic vision, which (with a huge credit to record label Jackson Rubio) was not watered down for the sake of mass accessibility. The poetry speaks volumes for those willing to delve a bit (from «Junkyard»):

beneath thick walls of skin and all its allure,
you betrayed yourself in an unguarded moment.
now we are lost, searching the ground for something…
life within loss, like words without sounds
blessed are the poor, the mourners, the meek,
all of us whores, losers and freaks…

The songs are personal, if not personable, and deal with tensions and joys of the human condition; they range from life touched by the divine (“your soul confides in the fundamental thread of God and humankind….jump in the river, wash away your sins..” – from «Thread») to daily struggles (“soft curves and subtle motions her body all reveals… well you’d like to tempt my mind but if you thought you had my will, then you don’t know me now…” – from «You Don’t Know Me Now»).

Deeble began garnering national notariety around 1991 (fans of the defunct ACM Journal will no doubt remember Robert Deeble’s moody single, «The Kiss», which graced the publication’s second compilation disc), and continued with Days Like These, a 1995 release that has recently seen international distribution. [Paul Soupiset, Communiqué Journal]

> Apple Music (https://music.apple.com/us/album/earthside-down/80079273)

CD tracklist:

01. Thread – 5:14
02. Earthside Down – 4:59
03. Open Air – 4:34
04. Two Statues – 3:59
05. Reprise – 1:08
06. Junkyard – 5:23
07. Anastasis – 4:48
08. Peter And The Lion – 6:58
09. You Don’t Know Me Now – 3:33
10. Lovers On Route – 5:39
11. Billboards – 12:45