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J Tillman - Vacilando Territory Blues
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ome might be surprised to learn that Tillman—who joined Seattle sensations Fleet Foxes as drummer last spring, along the way enhancing the group's spine-tingling harmonies—is now five albums into a solo career stretching back to 2004. In a strange inversion of pop's customary bent for instantly generated mass culture, Tillman's output has, for the most part, inhabited a secret universe. Pressed on tiny labels in minuscule numbers—100 here, 150 there—and passed around like the holy grail among the knowing few, those discs nonetheless form a body of work heralding the arrival of a major songwriter. Carving out a darkly brooding persona with roots in Neil Young's early '70s output, Richard Buckner's elliptical Americana, Nick Drake balladry, and assorted, harder-to-pinpoint gospel, country, blues, and folk idioms, Tillman’s two most recent solo long-players—Cancer and Delirium (2007) and Minor Works (2006)—are packed with memorable songs. Often built upon the simplest, ingratiating musical maneuvers--like the little stair-step acoustic guitar on Minor Works' "Crooked Roof"--Tillman's songs rarely hew to the literal, instead deftly navigating allegory and alienation, the occasional revelation stacked against heaps of melancholy....full text |
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| Spin |
| Fleet Foxes' comparatively glossy production and gentle harmonizing almost seem cartoonish when paired with the world-weary solo albums of the Seattle band's drummer, J. Tillman. On Tillman's fourth full-length, his husky, hushed voice echoes in the folksy expanses shared by Nick Drake, Will Oldham, and Seven Swans–era Sufjan Stevens, intoning aphorisms and snippets of vague, existential advice to some unnamed "you." But the dusty, reverent feel of even the album's wildest rockers gives the sense that he's just a lone wanderer battling solitude with sound....full text |
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| Guardian |
| Joshua Tillman had been releasing his own sparse, folk-influenced music for some years before he became the drummer for Fleet Foxes. Membership in one of 2008's most lauded bands could do wonders for that solo career; equally, it could leave some listeners feeling faintly disappointed. Where Fleet Foxes' music swells and soars, Tillman's songs crouch and mourn; his sound is more reminiscent of chilly, candlelit rooms than the magical forests of Fleet Foxes. Push the comparison aside, however, and there is much to admire in Tillman's fifth album. Often, restraint is its strength: it makes the scraped guitar in Barter Blues sound even more ominous, adds lustre to the organ melody in Master's House, and heightens the oomph of the two stomping rock songs. Lyrically, he's inclined to melancholy and po-faced philosophising, although the dry wit crackling in James Blues, and the gentle stoicism of Master's House, offer engaging counterpoints....full text |
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