Tales from the Realm of the Queen of Pentacles
3 February 2014
Cooking Vinyl
2 stars out of 5
Tales from the Realm
of the something or other is Suzanne Vega’s eighth studio album, coming
seven years after her seventh. The Queen of Pentacles is very different from La Reine des pétoncles, which is where
my mind immediately went, of course. As a suit in a typical tarot set, the
Pentacles or Coins is part of the Minor Arcana, and represents the Third Urban
Estate. None of this has anything to do with scallops, although the Queen, allegedly
generous with her wealth, might take you out for seafood one day.
“Crack in the Wall” serves as the prologue to this concept
album, wherein a door appears magically from a crack in the wall and we enter
the realm of the aforementioned monarch. Now, if we are permitted a little bit
of background here, Vega had a short-lived but fantastic experimental phase in
the early ‘90s part of her career, and her third and fourth LPs—days of open Hand and 99.9Fº, respectively—exploded the
boundaries of what had been a relatively safe domain of urban folk inhabited by
Vega during her first two LPs (the ones you’ve probably heard of if all you know
of Vega is “Tom’s Diner” and “Luka”). Tales
is not cut from that same experimental cloth musically, although it is
lyrically ambitious to a fault. The song cycle presented here revolves around
the world of the Tarot, with titles like “Fool’s Complaint” and “Portrait of
the Knight of Wands.” Musically, this is an album tailor-made for Starbucks
listening while you try to study for your systematic botany midterm. Luckily,
you can drown it out by putting in your earbuds and cranking up Jon Hopkins or
Fuck Buttons.
Vega is in her fifties now, and appears to be writing music
for people in their sixties, specifically those possessing multiple degrees and
pretentions to artiness. Perhaps when these people retire they will have the
time to sit down with the lyric sheet and try to decipher this album. It could
be a drinking game, where every time someone uncovers a Tarot reference (s)he
has to do a shot of Kentucky
reviewed by Richard Krueger
No comments:
Post a Comment