Sxip Shirey
A Bottle Of Whiskey and A Handful Of Bees
Reviewed by: Max Miller
Yeah, don’t worry, it’s pronounced “Skip.” And if you’ve never heard of him before, that “x” can almost tell you more about the man behind the moniker than I can. Shirey (who wasn’t even born just plain ol’ Skip, but, rather, Gene) is a composer who probably doesn’t mind if you describe him as quirky. He’s the kind of person who makes music using found objects. He’s the kind of person who’s associated with both the Daredevil Opera Company and a band called Gentlemen & Assassins. He’s the kind of person with a silly haircut, and who wears obnoxious eyewear in a healthy — and this is just a guesstimate — 66% of his promotional photographs. He’s the kind of person who calls himself fucking Sxip.
Truthfully, though, all those factoids about Shirey really don’t prepare you for his musical output. He’s had a truly multifaceted career composing music for theater, film and dance while also making music with the Luminescent Orchestrii. A Bottle Of Whiskey and a Handful Of Bees is only his third solo album, and it is clearly meant to be taken as just what it is — which is to say, not as a film score or an abstract composition, but as a pop album.
Opener “Over The City” prepares you for an album of ambient, experimental sound explorations, but as soon as “Penny Red (Internationale)” kicks in with its club-friendly synth throbs, it becomes clear that Shirey does not intend to be purposefully obtuse. If anything, the true experimentation on Bottle comes not from the music itself but from the way Shirey juxtaposes different pop styles alongside each other, as if he’s meticulously crafting a mixtape. “Penny Red” leads right into “Woman Of Constant Sorrow,” which features longtime Shirey collaborator Rhiannon Giddens of the Carolina Chocolate Drops laying down enough of her folksy blues stylings to make whatever stupid hat Jack White is wearing at this exact instant spin.
Giddens features on three other Bottle tracks, and Shirey also collaborates with singer XAVIER on three tracks (“I Got A Man,” “Cinnamon Stick” and “I Don’t See Her Walking In”). Shirey’s instrumentation on these more pop-oriented songs is certainly modern and progressive, but executed with great subtlety. Less subtle is the swaggering, six-and-a-half-minute “Grandpa Charlie,” which is laden with harmonica, accordion, horns and a bunch of other instruments that would sound great with Tom Waits singing over them. Unfortunately, however, the song is an instrumental.
Bottle is a tough album to judge, since consistency seems to be the last thing that was on Shirey’s mind when composing and collecting these tracks. “Latency (Jetlag)” is a highlight featuring horror-movie score bells layered with groovy digital scratches. The middle of the album features a handful of more mellow numbers on which Shirey himself sings. Pretty much all of the Giddens and XAVIER features are well spent. But much of the rest of the album, which clocks in at a whopping seventeen cuts, is a slog.
If I might extrapolate a bit from the sort of personality Shirey exudes, I imagine him to live in a home decorated with odd little disparate knick-knacks from across the past several decades. (I suppose if I were to take the track “This Is How You Break Into My House To Find Me” at face value, I could investigate to confirm this. Alas, my inquisitive journalistic drive knows certain boundaries.) But in the Shirey household I’m picturing, the chaos of all these incongruous odds and ends serves as the overall unifying force. Bottle feels like the musical equivalent of that sort of home, and whether it comes off as fascinating or overwhelming basically depends on you. If you’ve ever had a steampunk phase or perhaps have a few superfluous letters of your own in your name, you might find this album’s sprawling nature charming. The rest of us will kind of wish Shirey had done more editing.
Rating: Listenable
