Traditionally, pop music has usually reached into Arthurian legend for a useful metaphor. It’s, in spite of everything, a symbolist’s paradise – the enchanted vale of Van Morrison’s “Avalon Of The Coronary heart”, as an example, or David Crosby’s Californian hippie dream mirrored again as “Guinnevere”. The Moody Blues’ spellbound evocation of Camelot on “Are You Sitting Comfortably?”, maybe. Or, extra actually, Rick Wakeman’s preposterous chainmail folly on ice.
This ongoing thread of references in music – from Nat King Cole to Nas, Stevie Nicks to The Streets – tends to comply with a sample. Very similar to its depictions in literature, TV and movie, Camelot is invariably considered as shorthand for a sure form of superb perfection, a mythic crucible of braveness and the Aristocracy, the embodiment of utopia. Monty Python however, in fact.
Against this, Jennifer Fortress’s Camelot, as mapped on her seventh album, is one thing altogether extra nuanced. Hers is a battleground of opposing tensions, set towards the divisive instances of the current. There are ambiguities and contradictions, ecstatic visions and crises of religion. And a quest, not for some imagined grail, however for earthly and personal resolutions. All fastened to music of the beautiful selection, from radiant acoustic research to billowing symphonic pop.
Camelot seems like a landmark in Fortress’s profession. It’s definitely her most all-embracing document up to now, the complete fruition of an method that started, tentatively, with a pair of principally spare folk-countryish albums beneath her Castlemusic alias. The primary of these was launched some 18 years in the past, since when she’s quietly emerged as a expertise to rival contemporaries like Joan Shelley, Brigid Mae Energy or fellow Canadian Tamara Lindeman in her guise as The Climate Station.
A lot of Fortress’s earlier work has leaned in direction of the minimal, paring songs right down to their bones and investing them with refined and spacious atmospherics, guided by an effortlessly agile voice able to conveying each the on a regular basis and the existential. She isn’t averse to taking the expansive route both – think about the luxurious strings that cushion components of 2014’s Pink Metropolis; the full-band preparations of 2018’s Angels Of Demise – however Camelot combines one of the best of those impulses in newly adventurous methods.
The primary inkling arrived early this summer time, when “Blowing Kisses” broke almost 4 years of studio silence. Launched to soundtrack an episode of hit TV comedy-drama The Bear (Fortress used to work in a Toronto restaurant with the present’s co-producer and forged member Matty Matheson), it’s an eloquent tune that pushes the worth of basking within the second, pushed by jazz-ballad piano and a luxurious string association from Owen Pallett for Estonia’s FAMES Skopje Studio Orchestra. There’s all of the grace of a religious hymn, however it feels like a recent vow. “Don’t get it twisted,” sings Fortress, gliding across the melody and rising right into a mushy rapture, “My coronary heart’s nonetheless in it/My dedication’s a star.”
“Blowing Kisses” was the primary music tracked for Camelot. It’s a worthy showcase for her and the assembled band, a few of whose members go method again with Fortress, whereas others are comparatively new. Pay attention intently and you’ll nearly hear them – Carl Didur on piano, bassist Mike Smith, Evan Cartwright on drums, Fortress’s acoustic guitar – probing for the appropriate areas to fall in collectively. This method usually lends the album a charged, extemporised really feel.
Nothing captures this higher than the magnificent “Full Moon In Leo”. Right here, Fortress stays true to the lunar definition of the title – an optimum second to disclose the true inside self, an outpouring of ardour and creativity – by main a tune bouncing with vitality. Its gospel-funk coronary heart is pumped by fats guitar distortion, sax, whirling electrical piano and Fortress’s swooping voice. There’s a timeless high quality at work right here too, paying homage to, say, early ’70s Carole King or Laura Nyro at her most rhapsodic.
Lyrically, “Full Moon In Leo” is playful. “I push my broom/In my underwear and my perspective/And nothing extra,” enthuses Fortress two verses deep. However the music additionally embodies the paradox of Camelot as a complete. She’s bored with the capricious nature of the music trade, and in addition weary of ready to be seen on a broader scale: “I’ve obtained mates going gray/Simply awaiting my face/To reach on a billboard/On Fairfax Avenue/In sunny LA.” By the tip of the music although, Fortress is dedicated to the second as soon as once more, pledging allegiance to the artistic forces that form her. This, she decides, is the way in which it ought to be. She even carves her personal one-line epitaph on metaphorical stone: “The dream is alive and effectively.”
“Fortunate #8” is constructed of equally resistant stuff. Fortress invokes angels and archangels, cosmic regulation and experiential notions of being (“What proportion am I spirit?/What proportion is machine?”) to be able to make sense of the whole lot round us, however finally finds herself transported by the bodily rhythms of dance. The music strikes at an honest lick too, all ringing guitars, psychedelic overtones and beautiful harmonies. Longtime co-producer Jeff McMurrich steps up on lead guitar, whereas visitor Cass McCombs – whose personal music seems like an analogue to that of Fortress, with their friendship stretching again over a decade – makes a telling contribution on slide.
This concept of navigating a method by means of uncertainty is a central characteristic of Camelot. Sited round one in all Fortress’s favorite native climbing spots in Ontario, “Fractal Canyon” takes nourishment from the issues she holds expensive – mates, family members, the nice outdoor, the heat of a random reminiscence – whereas her unanswered questions ultimately give strategy to a easy affirmation: “And I’m not alone right here.” “Earthsong” carries a lot the identical sentiment. A fragile acoustic piece that highlights each Fortress’s silvery guitar-playing and superbly supple voice, it was impressed by Indian anti-GMO activist Vandana Shiva. The concept of seeds as symbols of nurture and development additionally ties into Fortress’s expertise as a farm labourer through the pandemic: “Mary, I do know it’s thee/People mom pouring tea/Secure and sitting on the seed.”
These sure-footed earthly connections function Fortress’s safety towards the issues that bother her, whether or not it’s the two-faced cronies of “Some Buddies” or the hypocrites and cynics that populate “Belief”, an emotional tug-of-war that ends with an ominously clanging piano chord. Or certainly the gory stigmata of “Mary Miracle”, knowledgeable by watching a TV information story on weeping non secular statues as a child, imagining the blood coursing “down the thighs of the porcelain angels/There by the riverbed thrashing within the mud.” The nightmarish depth of Fortress’s baby imaginative and prescient is mirrored within the music’s relentless churn, styled like an ’80s arcade keyboard run that refuses to pipe down.
Whether or not or not she finally ends up plastered on an LA billboard is anybody’s guess. However that’s absolutely not the purpose. A lot much less the objective. Of larger import is the truth that, almost 20 years into her creative life, Fortress has moved into her imperial section. The journey might not at all times be easy, however Camelot is the outward manifestation of that surer focus and readability of goal. And, it seems, the form of self-acceptance that solely comes with expertise. As she factors out right here: “I belong to the world.”
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