REVIEW : The Graduation Ceremony - No Ripcord

23 May, 2011 - by Juan Edgardo Rodriguez

7 out of 10 

For the past decade, Joseph Arthur has quietly dominated the field of disaffected singer-songwriters without much commercial awareness. When the Ohio native scored a left field hit with Honey & the Moon in 2002, there was talk about him fronting the next generation of new century poets, previously held by other brooding songwriters such as Jeff Buckley and Leonard Cohen. Arthur was the wild card in a race he had already lost by default – Damien Rice was the crowd favorite with his golden voice and tried and true acoustic approach, while Ryan Adams filled that patriotic void left after 9/11 with his impetuous rebellion and sensible heart. David Gray, well, suffered the fate of cult adoration and one hit wonder status.

Arthur proved to be perhaps too unconventional for a wider audience. His personal blend of surrealistic imagery and prophetic holiness undoubtedly puts him on a league of his own. He had the talent of divulging a very relatable posture with his brittle lamentations, but also swanked a chest filled with pedal effects and atmospheric layers like a mad magician. It’s as if he needed to defy the conventions of his own type to achieve personal salvation. In spite of this, he careened into slippery territory once he decided to group the Astronauts, a vanity solo project dressed up as an band where he could indulge on being a rock star with more than a handful of guitar hero gestures and rippling riffs than one could handle.

All these questionable phases came after Arthur gained creative freedom, which had him in a state of flux. After five years, he’s coming back to the elegiac quality of his acoustic work, acknowledging that the true face he wants to display is the one that hides behind his disfigured paintings. Long gone are the days of multifarious mysticism and splashes of spontaneity under an empty canvas; a persona he managed to role-play ingeniously in Come to Where I’m From. He instantly comes to terms in album opener Out on a Limb, a wilted acoustic meditation that has him accepting a failed relationship that will persist in his memory. In Almost Blue, a bluesy chord progression glides alongside a mid-tempo throb, with added details such as a starry backdrop and Arthur’s echoed vocals to enhance it from being just a plaintive ballad. These glum bearings are characteristically his own, except that now he tames these lyrical nuances with a luminous spirit.

If anything, the overall structure of Graduation Ceremony harks back to the calculated arrangements of Nuclear Daydream, in which he decided to tone down his idiosyncrasies to deliver a solid pop record of the same kind as when Lou Reed decided to write Loaded. The production is just as luxuriant – the assembly of a full orchestra adds profundity to Arthur’s sparse compositions. Arthur’s raspy falsetto in This Is Still My World overlap a chorus made out of his own voice, while a loungy bass thump and a few snare fills sustain his see-through finger picking. Watch Our Shadows Run is a gentle response to Our Shadows Will Remain – Arthur announces here comes the sun over a rousing violin build-up in the chorus, announcing his scorn over the one who decided to follow her own shadow. The strings usually leverage the mood, like in medieval-inspired Face In The Crowd, where Arthur's gospel presence cues in accordance with a rising choir.

Arthur approaches linear songwriting with such ease that it’s easy to overlook any significant flaws behind the deftly textured arrangements. With each successive listen – obviate Let’s Just Be – Arthur has begun to favor the benefits of solidity instead of letting loose his boundless ideas. However, more than half the songs exhaust a similar acoustic pattern of the same kind as those heard as back as in Big City Secrets. Even so, Graduation Ceremony is undeniably gorgeous – Arthur displays an emotional openness that hardly ever comes off as contrived or self-pitying. Coming from such impenetrable offerings, Arthur sounds reassured, as if he just inhaled a lungful of fresh air after traversing so many transformative periods. The avant-garde in him may be sorely missed, but the disposition he currently illustrates is the most important of all: himself.