Pitchfork评测Blake Mills新专Jelly Road

The singer-songwriter-superproducer teams with the Vermont jazz musician Chris Weisman for an invigorating collaborative album that’s whimsical and wistful in surprising ways.

这位歌手-词曲作者-超级制作人与佛蒙特州爵士音乐家Chris Weisman合作，制作了一张振奋人心的合作专辑，以令人惊讶的方式异想天开和渴望。

In 2019, Blake Mills and Chris Weisman were tasked with recording new music that sounded like it was 50 years old. They basically wrote an album’s worth of songs as a made-up band for the television adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel Daisy Jones & the Six, inspired loosely by the soft-rock drama of Fleetwood Mac. Energized by their introduction, the two continued working on new music that sounds like Jelly Road, with rich layers of guitars, vintage keyboards, and an assortment of woodwinds. In these 12 songs, they wrap surreal imagery in otherworldly melodies that feel blissful, seamless, and eerily suspended out of time.

2019年，Blake Mills和Chris Weisman的任务是录制听起来像50年前的新音乐。他们基本上是为改编自Taylor Jerkins Reid的小说《Daisy Jones&the Six》的电视剧创作了一张专辑的歌曲，灵感来自Fleetwood Mac的软摇滚歌剧。两人因他们的介绍而充满活力，继续创作听起来像Jelly Road的新音乐，有丰富的吉他、复古键盘和各种各样的木管乐器。在这12首歌曲中，它们用超凡脱俗的旋律包裹着超现实的意象，这些旋律让人感到幸福、无缝和诡异地悬在时间之外。

Jelly Road feels of a piece with Notes With Attachments, Mills’ 2021 album with bassist Pino Palladino, another spirited collaboration between studio heads. Mills has used his solo output to develop his reflective songwriting and immersive production style; as a producer and accompanist with Bob Dylan, John Legend, Phoebe Bridgers, and plenty more, he’s become a formidable presence who nonetheless functions as support for somebody else’s project. Mills’ two album-length alliances have allowed him to bring both practices to the fore, and in contrast to the spiky jazz slant of Notes With Attachments, Jelly Road is smooth and satisfying from start to finish. The opening guitar tumbles of “Suchlike Horses” are a tantalizing introduction, rippling outward into a pool of wavering synth lines that sounds like a wayward trombone.

Jelly Road感觉像是Mills与贝斯手Pino Palladino合作的2021年专辑《Notes With Attachments》，这是工作室负责人之间的另一场热烈合作。米尔斯利用他的独奏作品来发展他的反思性歌曲创作和沉浸式的制作风格；作为Bob Dylan、John Legend、Phoebe Bridgers等的制作人和伴奏者，他已经成为一个强大的存在，尽管如此，他还是为别人的项目提供支持。Mill的两张专辑长度的合作使他能够将这两种做法都放在首位，与Notes With Attachments的尖锐的爵士乐倾向相反，“Jelly Road”从头到尾都很流畅，令人满意。《Suchlike Horses》的开场吉他翻滚是一个吸引听众的介绍，向外波纹入一堆摇摆不定的合成器线条，听起来像一个任性的长号。

Weisman sketched out some of the shapes of Jelly Road on an iPad mini, emailing fragments to Mills late at night on borrowed Wi-Fi while he stood outside a local library branch in his hometown of Brattleboro, Vermont. Keeping a lower profile as a jazz-forward improviser, Weisman has admitted that he’s “always done only what the fuck I want to do, and skipped the stuff that irritated me” with regards his own work. In the same 10-year span that Mills has established himself as an in-demand producer, guitarist, and songwriter, Weisman has self-released more than 30 records of electroacoustic adventures, which range from longform deliberations to pocket-size petit fours.

Weisman在iPad mini上勾勒出了Jelly Road的一些形状，深夜，当他站在家乡佛蒙特州Brattleboro的当地图书馆分馆外时，用借来的Wi-Fi将碎片通过电子邮件发送给Mills。Weisman作为一名爵士前卫的即兴演奏家保持低调，他承认，关于他自己的工作，他“总是只做我他妈的想做的事，跳过了让我恼火的事情”。在Mills成为热门制作人、吉他手和词曲作者的10年时间里，Weismman已经自行发行了30多张电声冒险唱片，从长篇的思考到口袋大小的小唱片。

Weisman told Fretboard Journal that he wanted to encourage Mills’ virtuosity as a guitar player, which manifests in the meaty guitar solo at the end of “Skeleton Is Walking.” It returns in “Breakthrough Moon,” which has a solo passage that settles in like a layer of strong incense amid a loose layer of percussion. There’s a quicksilver streak of sleaze to Mills’ twists and turns, outlining the sort of seedy lounge scene that might play host to the creatures of Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues.”

Weisman告诉Fretboard Journal，他想鼓励Mills作为吉他手的精湛技艺，这体现在《Skeleton Is Walking》结尾的内容丰富吉他独奏中。它在“Breakthrough Moon”中回归，该月有一个独唱段落，就像在松散的打击乐层中沉淀下来，就像一层强烈的熏香。Mills的曲折有一种肮脏的闪烁，勾勒出了那种肮脏的休息室场景，这些场景可能会成为Steely Dan的《Deacon Blues》中生物的主角。

Jelly Road is populated with Hammond C3s, a Roland Juno-106, and a celeste, which Mills and Weisman alternate between an assortment of acoustic, fretless, and electric guitars and basses. Sam Gendel steers the Electronic Wind Controller on “Unsingable,” later picking up the more familiar saxophone for “Without an Ending.” On “Wendy Melvoin” and “There Is No Now,” he plays a massive contrabass recorder, adding a woody texture that feels both earthy and extraterrestrial. In “Highway Bright,” Weisman and Mills offer independent bass parts on each side of the mix, a detail that leaps out in close listens.

Jelly Road习惯用Hammond C3s、Roland Juno-106和celeste，Mills和Weisman在各种原声吉他、无弦吉他和电吉他和贝斯之间交替使用。Sam Gendel在《Unsingable》中操纵电子风力控制器（电子风控制器），后来拿起了更熟悉的萨克斯风《Without an Ending》。在《Wendy Melvoin》和《There Is No Now》中，他演奏了一个巨大的低音提琴录音机，增加了一种木质质感，给人一种泥土和外星人的感觉。在《Highway Bright》中，Weisman和Mills在混音的两侧提供独立的低音部分，这个细节在近距离聆听中跳出来。

The bewitching air of the instrumental “Wendy Melvoin”—named after the guitarist and vocalist from Prince’s band the Revolution and Wendy & Lisa—makes it one of the album’s strongest moments, and the woman herself joins Weisman and Mills on multiple tracks. Accompanying Prince, Melvoin was indispensable to the Revolution’s high-power sound; here, she expands the duo’s adventures with more subdued flourishes. In “Press My Luck,” her off-kilter wah-wah guitar additions sketch a loose figure, and the electronic interference that crackles through creates a picture that echoes the jumpy, colorful abstraction of scrambled cable.

以Prince的乐队Revolution和Wendy & Lisa的吉他手和歌手命名的器乐“Wendy Melvoin”的迷人气氛使其成为专辑中最强烈的时刻之一，这位女性自己也加入了Weisman和Mills的多个曲目。伴随Prince，Melvoin因对Revolution的高强度声音是不可或缺的；在这里，她以更柔和的繁荣扩展了两人的冒险。在《Press My Luck》中，她不合时髦的哇哇吉他的添加勾勒出一个松散的形象，噼啪作响的电子干扰创造了一幅与混乱的电缆跳跃、多彩的抽象相呼应的画面。

Though Jelly Road is an invigorating listen, at times, it feels like a case study in hauntology: its squishy production and armory of vintage gear evoke a warmth toward the past, while its lyrics and gently off-kilter melodies hint at wariness toward some vague future. Time is short and littered with empty material rewards in “The Light Is Long,” but it fully dissolves in “There Is No Now,” where Mills croons, “Time unfolding is a trick.” The soft piano and resonant percussion of “Unsingable” pads the reflexive approach, with Mills wondering aloud about the existential qualities of making music: “What can make a song unsingable? What can make a song feel lost?”

虽然Jelly Road是一个令人振奋的聆听，但有时它感觉就像鬼魂学的一个案例研究：它湿软的制作和复古装备的军械库唤起了对过去的温暖，而它的歌词和轻柔的旋律暗示着对一些未来不确定的警惕。在《The Light Is Long》中，时间很短，充斥着空洞的物质奖励，但它完全溶解在《There Is No Now》中，Mills在其中吟唱着“时间展开是一个把戏”。《Unsingable》的软钢琴和共鸣打击乐垫了反身式方法，Mills大声地想知道创作音乐的存在品质：“什么能让一首歌无法演唱？什么能让一首歌感到失落？”

In Jelly Road’s title track, Mills’ layered vocals breeze around percussive cloudbursts, its lyrics populated by once-happy dinosaurs and the cozy storybook kings Frog and Toad. It feels like spiritual kin to the kooky Jerry Garcia-David Grisman take on “Teddy Bears’ Picnic,” with a more wistful undercurrent that speaks to lost pleasures. “And though we’ve had some good times/This is what we chose/Tell me it again/About the Jelly Road,” Mills sings, with an air of melancholy that such a place exists only in fantasia. Though clouds of doubt hang in the eaves of Jelly Road, Mills presents a straightforward perspective in “Press My Luck,” where he offers, “Things start getting clearer when they’re fucked.” The path forward may be paved with crumbling bricks, but, as Jelly Road suggests, there might be unknown delights left to discover along the way.

在Jelly Road的标题曲中，Mills的分层人声围绕着突然的倾盆大雨，其歌词充满了曾经快乐的恐龙和童话书友好的国王青蛙和蟾蜍。感觉就像古怪的杰里·加西亚-大卫·格里斯曼（Jerry Garcia-David Grisman）的精神亲属在《泰迪熊的野餐》（Teddy Bears' Picnic）中，带着更渴望的暗流，讲述了失去的乐趣。“虽然我们度过了一些美好的时光/这是我们选择的/再告诉我一遍/关于果冻路（Jelly Road），”Mills带着忧郁的气氛唱道，这样一个地方只存在于幻想曲中。虽然怀疑的云层笼罩在果冻路的屋檐下，但Mills在《Press My Luck》中提出了一个直截了当的视角，他说：“当他们搞砸的时候，事情就会变得清晰起来。”前进的道路可能铺满了摇摇欲坠的砖块，但正如Jelly Road所暗示的那样，沿途可能还有未知的乐趣需要发现。