Tim Bluhm: The Soft Adventure EP/Colts

Musicians are often criticized for appropriating identities naturally alien to them. A kid from the suburbs singing about the anxieties of city life can be a tough nugget to digest, but if the delivery is authentic enough to pass for at least a good replica of the real deal, the transgression is likely forgiven. Bob Dylan’s pitch-perfect co-opting of Woody Guthrie could have been considered one of the greatest falsities in modern music, but the uncanny way we was able to evoke the feeling of his inspiration won over the stubborn folkies — they would turn on him, four years later when he grew into electric music, but that’s another story. The fact he was from middle class Minnesota seemed to matter little once he began belting out those dust bowl ballads as real an anyone. In short, you’d better know your adopted roots darn well before attempting to lay any sort of claim on them through your own art. The identity of the player is invariably espoused to what is being played, and if either is contrived, the audience will need some convincing as to why the performer sings about the Mississippi when it was in fact the Hudson that spawned this fish out of water before them. Now what does any of this have to do with Tim Bluhm? Well, Bluhm sidesteps these pitfalls by using his own environment for inspiration: he’s from California, he writes and sings about California and a good portrait he paints of it all.

Bluhm’s background as the lead singer and songwriter for the Mother Hips, a country-rock band with a cult-like following on the West Coast but an almost nonexistent following on this one, has primed him for his own outing with the combination EP and album, The Soft Adventure/Colts. Backyard parties, vagrant musicians, rolling machines, teen-spying parents, failed relationships, and dead babies are a few tiles that make up Bluhm’s West-Coast mosaic. “The Only Solution” details the nomadic life of, well, Bluhm himself: a wandering musician, awed by the soft things his friends make the basis of their lives like “insurance and gold rings” — inhabiting an alternate reality among the weirdoes who subscribe to the system they were programmed for. California has long been home to soul-searching idealists, on the hunt for a utopia amid the madness, and Bluhm falls right in with them. The world is so fucked up that, might as well concoct a personal microcosm available only to those who share, or want to share, the same ideals and distaste for the oppressive conventions of society. His irritation reappears in “Life in the City” and “The Bad Always Wins”. Reject society, move into your van, and write songs about how weird everyone else is; a tried and true rebellious artist formula. But Bluhm wouldn’t want you to think of it as rebellion, rather as the logical way of things, the only solution.

“I Can’t Stay” supplies descriptions of nuclear reactors tucked into the hills, as alien an element in nature as Bluhm himself is in the world as most of us wretches know it. He must leave the woman, but he can’t explain to her why — well, surely because she can’t grasp the dude’s philosophy of societal rejection and is unable to divorce herself from the false comforts her suburban life affords. Down to the drapes, the lamp, and the bottles of medication, Bluhm snaps a grim photo of the circumstances that he flees and the reasons for his departure become clear. The sunny drawl of his country strums, matter-of-fact vocals and surprisingly textured sonic palette exist either to contrast the grayness of the environment or perhaps he simply employs that old country standard: I’m ditchin’ you and here’s this gee-tar music to show you how I’m gonna do it. The potentially grave subject matter is made light by the jaunty delivery. But Bluhm is never really cheery — his brightest moments are always communicated with a murkiness, as if fed through a hissing amp. A style both he and the slow-as-molasses country songster Will Oldham seem to favor. In any event, the depressing mood is effectively conveyed and we’re all glad to be far away from the reactors.

In “Spotless As You”, Bluhm asks, “Why should you follow me down, someone as spotless as you” to another girl who doesn’t get him. The smug lyrics make us pause and think that maybe this guy isn’t the shrewd, witty observer of life we though he was. Maybe he’s just a whiny, bitter, neo-hippie out to write songs defaming all the women who’ve dumped him as well as all those who challenge his ideology. But this reaction is fleeting and “Pick It Up (Requiem for the Rolling Machine)” confirms Bluhm’s got a sense of humor after all — a wry one at that. The idea that a bunch of stoners would be “screaming ’bout the rolling machine” and would actually feel the need to drive back to pick it up is a funny thought in itself, and when compounded with a soft-rock vibe and Bluhm’s Tom Petty-on-downers drawl, the result is exactly what the title promises: a requiem for a rolling machine, which, dear lord, is sublimely inane. Bluhm’s ironic grin gleams through a façade of sobriety and it’s this peculiarity that characterizes his music throughout. We realize in the end that if he is preaching, it’s thickly veiled by his awareness of the absurdity of it all, from doomed romance, to suburbia to drug paraphernalia.

The ironic grin fades at times to reveal some straightforward, almost shimmery ballads, like the melancholic, piano-driven “Sadness of the Masses”. He even gets a little psychedelic with the Quicksilver Messenger Service-style warble of “Rose”. His darkest moment, “Tiny Blue Coffin”, finds him singing about his friend’s baby, found dead on the floor with a note on top instructing the finder to “place her in a tiny blue coffin”. The two emotions I felt were, first, shocked revulsion at this person’s complete inability to deal with the reality of his misfortune, second, a real sympathy for the bewildered parent who has just lost his child (whose mother is also dead — one can only imagine what sort of gothic scenario played out at this poor woman’s demise). But for a moment Bluhm puts us in the middle of the horrifying tableau, enabling us to somehow understand it all. In all, the situations he describes, we always know where it is he’s leading us and he is always able to convince us as to his authority on the matters at hand. The gravity and actual importance of many of these situations is debatable but his gift lies in his ability to effectively transport us to his native soil. It is for this reason that his music is, in the end, very compelling.