MICHAEL ALAHOUZOS
Staff Writer
If music has a timeframe, then Daniel Brummel’s “Speak Easy” is timeless. You couldn’t even call it pop music, though at one time, it would have been.
The ghosts of the music-past are, right now, looking down upon this virile 23-year-old with jealousy and suspicion. After all, Brummel is one of the voices of the recently reformed Ozma, Southern California’s best indie-pop secret. “How,” they might ask, “did this happen?”
Anyone who has seen one of Brummel’s quiet, smoky, almost jazzy solo performances has probably thought the same thing once or twice. Brummel himself may still be asking himself that very question.
For a fusion record, “Speak Easy “ doesn’t easily fall into any category. “It’s a bit Brazilian,” Tito Puente might have said.
“It’s very Irish-Celtic,” Johnny Cash might have thought.
“It’s like a geode,” the Natural Science Division might say. “One of those rocks that are rough and coarse on the outside, but when you cut it in half, it’s like diamonds.”
That may be a stretch, but it’s true. Folksy and catchy, but innovative, “Speak Easy” as a whole is a true, rare gem.
“It’s not the type of CD that just runs off the assembly line,” former Pepperdine student Jelli Wong said. “It’s a piece of art, not machinery.”
And she’s right.
The album may be as hard to find as a real speakeasy was. “Speak Easy” shares a name with the type of nightclubs that secretly served alcohol in the 1920s during Prohibition (Pepperdine students may feel sympathy), but it’s more than just a history lesson.
The compact disc is a map through history.
Think about it. Robert Johnson, Carl Perkins, Gabriel García Márquez, Bob Dylan, Fulcanelli, Rainer Maria Rilke, George W., Homer, the god Hermes:
What do they all have in common?
Nothing, and neither do Hitler and Amelia Earhart, but they’re in the same history book anyway. That’s how encompassing “Speak Easy” is.
One simple downside to the record is that many of the references to Mötley Crüe make the album confusing.
You could sit down, listen to, and completely enjoy “Speak Easy” without ever even knowing that the whole album is centered on Hermitic Alchemy, and that’s OK.
It’s a very tough message to take from the record, but it is there (and man, are you in over your head if you’re trying to understand this stuff).
Having said that, you are perfectly OK in listening to Brummel’s catchy soundscape without thoughts of chemistry, physics, astrology, mysticism, spiritualism and the art of taking these physical procedures of alchemy as a metaphor for purifying the soul. No one will hold it against you (though, honestly, how often is it that a CD falls into your lap containing all the secrets of the universe?)
Despite so much invention on the record, four of the 12 songs on Speak Easy are songs we have already heard before. “Barbara Allen” and “Banks of the Ohio” are traditions that any music enthusiast worth his/her salt has collected (or stolen from their dad’s copy of the “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” soundtrack).
Though the standards are nice, Speak Easy sounds best when it’s just Brummel and drummer Corey Foley getting messy in their apartment, which is a very different take on the clean, rocking sound Brummel has created with Ozma for the past seven years.
It happens to the best of them; rockers hang up their group-rock personas to become solo-folk/jazz artists as their talents and palettes develop. It happened to Neil Young (“Harvest Moon”), it happened to John Lennon (“Working Class Hero”), and it’s been happening to Bob Dylan for the last 6,000 years.
Unlike the others, Brummel works his Speak Easy lifestyle in congruence with his California powerhouse, Ozma, and it’s clear his musical prowess is transcendental. It would be easy for him to take “Language of the Birds,” blast it through a PA with some electric guitars and keyboards and still have it be the best song on a future Ozma album.
As it is on Speak Easy, though, it’s musical and conceptual perfection.
At the break in “Language of the Birds,” when the soft-spoken, nylon-stringed guitar and percussion drop out, and the gentle, frightened piano, in the face of death, crescendos into a whirlwind of hope and fear, it’s clear that as haunted as he is, Brummel’s tunes don’t fear that type of death. Now that’s timeless.
One of the most beautiful things about the record is that Brummel sings like a marked man who knows it. He croons at the reaper face-to-face on “O Death,” begging, “O, Death / won’t you spare me over for another year?” with affliction and regret for his wrongs. You can almost visualize him meeting the maker every year and begging for a second chance. For all we know, they play checkers every December. So long as he keeps winning, I think that everyone will be happy.
Never mind the alchemy and never mind the mysticism, for now. Speak Easy says a lot more than you can understand in a multitude of listens, but just enjoy it while you last. Timeless records have a knack for outlasting everyone.
”Speak Easy” can be listened to at www.copticrecords.com.
04-13-2006
