RANDY KAPLAN has a lot of songs. He stands alone, within equidistant small-rock-hurling reach of PAUL SIMON, WOODIE GUTHRIE, IVOR CUTLER and THE LONESOME ORGANIST. With 28 songs on two CDs and a total playing time of way over two hours your reviewer is just never going to be able to guide you with any certainty. But some things do stand out.
His musical approach is homemade cheerful multi-instrumental confidence with a harmonica. It’s delightful small scale foolishness with plunder chests full of styles and rhythms sitting under clever drolleries and nifty tunes that include lines like "she makes me listen to Tom Jones while she talks Japanese on the telephone" or "I'm going to die right here. Get me a notary. I want a big big funeral!". There are a lot of instruments making very pretty, quirky, funny and sometimes dead right noises throughout. Maybe the drum machine is a bit tiresome. C'mon Randy. Get some lessons. I bet you could do a decent job with the sticks.
I'm trying to think of how I can persuade you to track this collection down. And I'm in two minds about whether I should even try. It isn’t high art. It isn’t going to move you to extreme passions. It isn’t going to solve you emotional or marital problems. It’s just dead good entertaining perkiness. And I almost guarantee that Mr Kaplan sells van loads of these albums at gigs in New York (did I mention he was born on Long Island?). His personal story telling, his cheerful nuttiness, his ability to slip into and out of the mournful or the weird … these are the qualities that the man will convey most in person.
|
These are also the face to face qualities that make two hours listening to a CD from the other side of the Atlantic a real test to attention deficit disorder. Home made vernacular music needs a smaller scale to work. Strewn across my iTunes and popping up at random amongst the Robyn Hitchcock, the Ded Prez, the Bob Dylan and the Tom Waits, these songs will inject some sunshine, some wry humour and some sweet surprises to the mix. Another way of looking at it is that RANDY KAPLAN is a novelty jukebox with more of a brain and a sweeter soul than you’d credit on first listen.
When you get the full album for yourself, see if you can find the "Eye of a Tiger" quote. You can then go look for his four earlier albums. Good luck!
|
