Alabaster DePlume Album Review: A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole
Last year, Mancunian musician Alabaster DePlume previewed his most recent album A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole with, among other things, a poetry book. Moreover, in making Blade, he strayed from his usual wholly collaborative and pseudo improvisational process, instead composing the album's songs by himself before recording to analog tape with other players. On paper, the combination of these two departures might make you think the record was careful, pointed, and direct. While it's indeed DePlume's softest album yet, Blade is surprisingly welcoming in its openness and formlessness. He made the record in response to the question, "What do people need?", the crowdsourced answer being, to heal himself and others, to restore dignity to humanity in a world that doesn't take care of its people and that funds a genocide in Palestine. DePlume knows such a journey is not linear; Blade necessarily meanders.
It's rare, on an album comprised of spoken word mantras, for the instrumentation to more effectively communicate its emotion than does the prose. Blade represents one case. First off, half of the album is lyric-less, including a four-song mid-album suite, yet almost every tune features DePlume's trembling, singing tenor saxophone. Macie Stewart provides forlorn string arrangements on four songs, Donna Thompson a mix of thumping drums, jazz rhythms, and heavenly vocals on the majority of them. More importantly, DePlume has the uncanny ability to imbue his words with intention. On "Thank You My Pain", in which he quotes Vietnamese monk and peace activist Thích Nhất Hạnh, DePlume tackles the idea that we should embrace that which troubles us. Even so, when you read him addressing his pain, with lines like, "When they fall away, you come through," you can't help but wonder whether he's being facetious. Yet, his sprechgesang in conjunction with warbling saxophone and prickly guitar, atop Thompson and Ruth Goller's funk bounce and ascending backing vocals, reveals the song to be an undeniable exclamation of pure genuineness. On "A Paper Man", he allows held vocal notes to disclose the inherent creakiness of his voice, supplying textural diversity to mirror his thesis statement: "There doesn't need to be in you or I / A good guy or a bad guy or a victim or a villain." Systems fail us, but we, as people, are not doomed.
As much as Blade reflects the power of the individual person, or human potential, its aesthetic belies that DePlume wrote it, for the most part, alone. In other words, it sounds like a band record. Take opener "Oh My Actual Days", which introduces DePlume's saxophone, Stewart's violin, and Mikey Kenney's voice in sync on one hand, Thompson's drums and John Ellis' piano on the other. A circular hymnal, it swirls until the cymbals climactically crash, eventually giving way again to a solemn prayer. "Form A V"--named after an exercise in jiu-jitsu where a person facing a dojo has to fend off attacks by others one at a time, from all angles--centers DePlume's layered saxophone, surrounded by Momoko Gill's clacking drums, Conrad Singh's creeping electric guitar, and Rozi Plain's lurking bass. The same players give a totally different sounding performance on the excellently titled "Salty Road Dogs Victory Anthem", combining the percussive crunch of Tortoise with the haze of dream pop.
DePlume not only practices jiu-jitsu in real life but references it multiple times on Blade, first on "Form A V" and second on "Kuzushi", whose title is a term for breaking your opponent's balance. The martial art is the perfect metaphor for Blade, an album that emphasizes both interpersonal interaction and self-reflection, for the intent purpose of gaining multi-dimensional strength. "That was my garden," DePlume repeats on the album's closer, in reaction to others treating his bed of flowers like garbage. Invitational rather than antagonistic in his attempts to heal the globe, he has once again become like the blade: whole.
