REVIEW: Tom Maxwell, Samsara (Independent Record Company)
- Michelle Aguilar
Reading the press sheet that accompanies the reviewer's copy of this former Squirrel Nut Zipper's solo venture, one would think that Tom Maxwell's new album Samsara is going to fall into that small rock-musician-explores-faux-world-beat category I like to call "gone troppo." This is when musicians who have heretofore enjoyed mainstream rock success abandon said rock world to chase their inner musical demons across the globe. Think Paul Simon in South Africa, David Byrne in Brazil, Stewart Copeland in Burundi. Wait a minute, I'm showing my age again, aren't I? Dammit.
In its first paragraph, Maxwell's press release tries to separate him from the SNZ camp by implying that he just had to escape the straitjacket of the Zippers' image in order to get to his real self, the one that communes with "a fury of passionate diatribes on music from the Far East, India, Trinidad, America's South and New York's Harlem." Well, suffice it to say that as much as I love Tom Maxwell and all the 'round-the world influences he brought to SNZ, this is not a "gone troppo" album in my book. With a few exceptions, Samsara is not all that giant a leap away from what Maxwell was doing in the Zippers. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Maxwell had a consistent track record with SNZ, writing most of their singles, some of them my favorites (including "Trou Macaq," and "Put A Lid On It"). He also wrote all the band's calypsos and I'm a sucker for that stuff. But I suppose that's beside the point, now isn't it?
So why did Maxwell leave the Zippers? I really don't know and neither Mammoth (http://www.mammoth.com) nor Maxwell (http://www.tommaxwell.com) seems to be saying. And despite what this press release says, nor does a listen to this solo venture provide a solid answer.
While there are five or six songs here out of fifteen that probably would have never made the SNZ cut, I have trouble believing that songs like "Sixes and Sevens To Me," "The Uptown Stomp," "The Mooche," (a Duke Ellington cover, for God's sake) "If I Had You," "Caveat Emptor," "Don't Give Me The Runaround" or "You Always Get What's Coming" would have been considered stylistically inappropriate for the SNZ's typically smorgasbord albums. Maxwell even has female torch singers standing in for Katherine Whalen (Holly Harding Baddour on "If I Had You" and Mrs. Melanie Maxwell on "Flame In My Heart"), although, to be fair to these two fine vocalists, Baddour and Melanie Maxwell carve out on their own valid ground and in no way attempt to duplicate Whalen's tricks. In particular, check out Baddour's mock-Chinese opera performance on "Some Born Singing."
Most of these are catchy, interesting songs exploring the depths of '20s, '30s and '40s music that reveal themselves more after a few listens. Like the SNZ albums, Samsara is a little of this and that, although here Maxwell widens the scope a little to include old-time country and the blues. They are generally more true to the genres they lionize than the Zippers ever managed to be with its sheen of loving hipster irony. This album sounds less slick than the SNZ's last album, "Perrenial Favorites," and more often like a guy left in the studio to simply do what he does. It evokes in a charming way the relatively casual attitude with which old blues singers were once recorded. Sure, there are also a few interesting departures into world music, such as "Some Born Singing," the title track and the transcendental, all too-short instrumental, "Indicatif," which features a Chinese sona. (Go look it up, I had to.) But I assert that the majority of these songs would find fans among many SNZ lovers, if they came them half a chance.
So, then what split the Zippers? Given the above, band politics seems suspiciously to blame, an idea lent credence by the fact that SNZ member Ken Mosher also recently left the Zippers camp. But then, Maxwell has formed his own label, The Independent Record Company (http://www.independentrecordco.com) and may have simply realized that he could make a lot more money selling his own solo albums than begging for two or three songs per album at the SNZ table. The Mammoth marketing machine and the SNZ's cool cat image present certain economic advantages to which Maxwell will no longer have access now. But, hopefully, those advantages will eventually even out and Maxwell's songs will be judged for what they always were in the Squirrel Nut Zippers -- not quirky, inexplicable alternative hits, but an exploration of a time and place when folk and pop music were not mutually exclusive.
