Anyone who reads my reviews here at American Pancake know that I often times connect music with imagery and that the marriage of music and film feels so incredibly powerful and natural to me. Because of this, sometimes I speak about music in terms of film or film makers. As I am listening to "Market and Black" by Griffith James (and featuring Tennis) I can't help but feel like this song, with it's wanderlust cadence and sweeping lyrical content so endearingly transmuted into melodic emotions by James' earnest, astute vocal aesthetic and Alaina Moore's (Tennis) artful countenance, that it feels like a story as told by Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson and Terry Zwigoff either individually or, even better, as a trio.
While "Market and Black" is perfectly produced, I have the feeling that James could sell it so nicely even as an acoustic based song hammered out in a quaint downtown (busker style) and it would still transport me somewhere else. James based in Los Angeles will be releasing a full length album around 8/27 of this year.
This is the moment I paste up a section of Griffith James' press notey stuff. Not because I am lazy but because it is perfectly written and reveals important, wonderful, unusual reasons for why this man is original and different. I always bracket what I don't pen (wink). About the upcoming album:
[A rumination on separation and loss, a melancholy flashback to childhood fevers and full-blown hallucinations, melodies beautifully stitched together from fragmented memories of dissolute afternoons on the needle-strewn blocks of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. This is Griffith James’ “Market and Black,” an elegiac prayer for stability, buoyed by Tennis’ Alaina Moore, whose guest vocals offer a transcendent grace (Moore and her partner in Tennis, Patrick Riley produce the forthcoming album).
The sound is somewhere between the beatific and fragile hymns of Elliott Smith crossed with the shaky-handed whimsy of Harry Nilsson. The sad psychedelic pop of The Zombies alchemized with the nostalgic sunshine reveries of The Kinks. It results in a feeling both hauntingly dislocating and achingly familiar. James’ musical epiphanies are hard-fought: the culmination of a decade’s worth of writing and many lives lived. Raised everywhere between Dallas and Seoul, he moved 17 times in his first 18 years under the direction of a sectarian Christian culture that informed every aspect of his family’s life. A rift between the church and his family led him to become a teenage runaway on the streets of San Francisco, sleeping in parks until a Buddhist monk took him in. A love of music substituted for the religious fervor of his youth. It is a form of healing, a ceremony of rituals and bloodletting. Wounds slowly starting to close.]
Our experience shape us like a sculptor's hands. Sometimes the sculptor unfortunately leaves unnecessary material and we spend an entire life peeling it off. Things like art help us do just that. The Offical Video for "Market and Black" as directed, shot and edited by Luca Venter feels like the remnants of a broken doll house or life as surreal staging with Griffith James sporting a real black eye. It feels a bit like a 60's 16mm art film you would see in middle school with a strong somber patina. Lovely stuff like the song itself.
-Robb Donker Curtius
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM - PRESS NOTES:
Apple Music
YouTube
A rumination on separation and loss, a melancholy flashback to childhood fevers and full-blown hallucinations, melodies beautifully stitched together from fragmented memories of dissolute afternoons on the needle-strewn blocks of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. This is Griffith James’ “Market and Black,” an elegiac prayer for stability, buoyed by Tennis’ Alaina Moore, whose guest vocals offer a transcendent grace (Moore and her partner in Tennis, Patrick Riley produce the forthcoming album).
The sound is somewhere between the beatific and fragile hymns of Elliott Smith crossed with the shaky-handed whimsy of Harry Nilsson. The sad psychedelic pop of The Zombies alchemized with the nostalgic sunshine reveries of The Kinks. It results in a feeling both hauntingly dislocating and achingly familiar. James’ musical epiphanies are hard-fought: the culmination of a decade’s worth of writing and many lives lived. Raised everywhere between Dallas and Seoul, he moved 17 times in his first 18 years under the direction of a sectarian Christian culture that informed every aspect of his family’s life. A rift between the church and his family led him to become a teenage runaway on the streets of San Francisco, sleeping in parks until a Buddhist monk took him in. A love of music substituted for the religious fervor of his youth. It is a form of healing, a ceremony of rituals and bloodletting. Wounds slowly starting to close.
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