1. Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme/Canticle*
2. Patterns*
3. Cloudy
4. Homeward Bound
5. The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine
6. The 59th Bridge Street Song (Feelin' Groovy)
7. The Dangling Conversation
8. Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall
9. A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara'd into Submission)
10. For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her*
11. A Poem on the Underground Wall
12. 7 O'clock News/Silent Night
A+
I'm a big fan of economy in song writing. Not to say that I don't like longer, more expansive songs; but it is nice to here music that gets in and gets out quick, accomplishing what it sets out to do with a minimum of fuss. At 28 minutes long, and featuring twelve songs, PSRAT (I'm not typing that title over and over) is a model of economy in song writing. Most of these songs don't even have a traditional verse-chorus-verse structure. Instead they're little poems, or meditations even, set to music. And what beautiful music! Art Garfunkel's angelic voice floats and bends and twists over bongos, pianos, strings, harpsichords and gentle, picked guitars. The duo co-produced this album, and it's a wonderful example of what happens when perfectionism, talent and good taste all come together in the one place.
The lyrics are also pretty great. This is folk music, but it's not angry or obscure like Bob Dylan, or buried in traditionalism like Joan Baez. Paul Simon writes songs that are an antidote to troubled times (it's no coincidence that the duo would release an album called Bridge Over Troubled Water). His lyrics are poetic, but also direct and easily comprehensible, and rather than trying to curry favour with the freak scene or stick to some imagined ideal of "pure" folk music, he instead deals with the issues that trouble any literate, slightly-alienated person in times as hectic as the mid-to-late 1960s. This is probably what, given the sorry state of our modern world over the last decade, gives the music on this album such staying power. It's not a retreat, or a mockery. There are delicate folk ballads like the title track and "Flowers Never Bend", but there are also songs tackling everything from predetermination and feeling trapped by the modern world (the terrifying "Patterns"), to true romance ("For Emily"), and the hilarious "A Simple Desultory Philippic" - a song which parodies the folk rock excesses of Dylan while at the same time dealing with the crushing weight of information overload and the sense of being buried under current events and changing social standards. It also features the great line "He's so unhip that when you say Dylan, he thinks you mean Dylan Thomas, whoever he was", which is a wonderful dig at hippies and hipsters on an album that name checks Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson.
The best summation of this album is probably the final track, "7 O'clock News/Silent Night", which is hardly subtle but makes a good point. As Simon and Garfunkel sing a very pretty version of the famous carol, a newscaster (starting softly and then getting louder and louder, until he buries the music), reads off a typical news report from the time - the Vietnam War, civil rights protests, the drug overdose of comedian Lenny Bruce, and so forth. It perfectly captures the contrast on this album between a desire for a free, simple, happy life, and the constant intrusion of hassles ranging from the minor to the apocalyptic.
Above all, though, this album is a massive leap forward, musically, from the folk we've had so far. Simon spent a fair while in the UK, and he seems to have been pretty strongly influenced by the gentler, more adventurous and forward-thinking sounds of British folk. This is lovely, at times challenging, and highly intelligent music for the sort of people I once heard referred to as Triangles - fun, but not too fun. It's music for undergraduate English majors and tired housewives alike, and it's really great.
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