AYD Weekly | 'Utopia Revisited'
Big swings and dramatic departures from songwriter Jim Infantino
One of the pleasures of being alive in the company of artists that you admire (and love) is that they make new art. It is 2023, and it is nearly two years since the vaccines helped accelerate our emergence from the tightest grip of COVID-19, and I am increasingly aware that the artists I admire are doing new work.
Not all of them. And if they are not, that does not mean they’re lazy or moving backward — as Billy Bragg once told us — but some of them are, and increasingly more of them. I’m looking forward to using this little space we’ve made for culture, art, music, reviews, lives and stories to follow my favorite artists' work as it does emerge.
And we get to do that today. It’s a new album from Jim Infantino, a songwriter who’s been on with us before, all the way back in Season One, and it’s not only a new recording of songs, but it’s a big swing and dramatic departure. These are a few of my favorite things. And you, dear listener, are in for an electronic treat.
Hi, I’m James O’Brien, and this is my newsletter. This is ‘All Your Days.’
The perilous thing about putting on a clever suit is that people expect to see you wearing it whenever you come around. To some extent, this is the curse that afflicts songwriters who yearn to out-write each other and one that also attaches itself to performers who have reputations for being quirky, witty and wry. A kind of heaviness accumulates, a pause that forces itself into the endings of lines — did you catch that lyrical flourish — a weary trudge back to the top of Fun (or Funny) Mountain.
There is a countervailing movement, a motion in the atmosphere that feels like a relief from all these elements in the soft, strange, cut-up and programmed music that Jim Infantino has recorded with producer Kurt Uenala — who’s worked on tracks with Depeche Mode and Dave Gahan over the years — and released in the form of a new album, ‘Utopia Revisited.’
For many years, Jim has put out fun and funny, smart and clever songs as the front person of the band Jim’s Big Ego. Their songs are in the rock idiom, mostly propulsive, almost always about more than one thing at once — and they can veer from light to dark in a moment — but they commonly inflect from starting points of surreality and absurdism. The trick is in the inflection; it’s in the noticing of the trick.
‘Utopia Revisited’ is not that.
Part of the impulse for ‘Utopia Revisited’ is a book, a series of books, that Jim has been writing in recent years — ‘The Wakeful Wanderer’s Guide to New England and Beyond’ and its sequel ‘The Wakeful Wanderer’s Guide to Disillusionment.’ ‘Utopia Revisited’ is subtitled after these books, ‘songs for the wakeful wanderer’s guide.’
These are novels, post-apocalyptic stories that follow a cast of characters living in a partially rebuilt version of the United States long after climate change has altered the map. There’s a kind of psychic internet that some share and some resist, and there are marauding armies and conflicts of civilization, all the stuff of the science fiction that infuses Jim’s imagination.
You don’t need to know the novels to hear these tracks on their own terms. The songs and sounds of ‘Utopia Revisited’ are mysterious, almost cryptic. It doesn’t even matter what it means, “I jumped over the ocean / one kilometer high;” it’s sufficient that the lines invoke an image and that the music Jim and Kurt have created to carry the image is immersive, bending toward ambient but also stirring echoes of Eno-esque arrangements, the B-side of Bowie’s “Low” or passages of “Music for Airports.”
Electronic approaches are not entirely new to Jim Infantino’s work. In the late 1980s, he worked on early tracks for an album called ‘Ha,’ recorded with a musician named Lionel Casson. It was a fusion of synthesizers and acoustic guitars and drum machines. Back in episode 13 of the ‘All Your Days’ podcast, there’s a clip of a track titled “Lionel Say,” which Jim put out in 1996 on a Jim’s Big Ego album titled ‘More Songs About Me’ but the arrangement that maybe speaks to his electronic experiments of eight years prior can be found on a compilation of collaborations that Jim appears on with the poet/performer Chris Chandler.
The track’s arrangements and organizations are electronic sensibilities, but it is a hybrid sound, resonant wooden structures meeting electrical pathways. Jim soon moved into a more analog kind of writing and performing, but now the story comes a kind of full circle, and we have before us ‘Utopia Revisited.’
Yet, there is still a push and pull within ‘Utopia Revisited,’ the acoustic/analog songwriter’s muscle memory is evident in several more or less conventionally arranged tracks. At its best, this push-and-pull achieves a sort of Talking Heads energy, with “Psychic Xombies” hailing from that groovy, herky-jerky land of David Byrne.
The heart of ‘Utopia Revisited,’ though, is in its slower soundscapes, and when it’s getting that alchemy just right, it’s potentially Jim’s most unusual and involving work to date. Perhaps it won’t thrill every fan of Jim’s Big Ego, but then, it’s not a Jim’s Big Ego record — it’s a Jim Infantino release.
Over on the podcast, which posts every Tuesday, there’s additional material about the album and Jim’s work, including clips from the record. This week that means some new interview segments; Jim talked with me about ‘Utopia Revisited’ this month, and that makes for the first time a previous guest has revisited the podcast in a new interview (making this an appropriately titled album to accompany that development).
Also, if you like this week’s format, subscribe to the newsletter for more reviews every Thursday. Subscriptions to the newsletter also include a Saturday morning roundup of events, causes, and other things that align with the ideas and values this project seeks to embody.
Until next week, thanks for reading. Thanks for being part of this new step in the work. I’m James O’Brien, and this is my newsletter. This is ‘All Your Days.’