Ash Tree

www.myspace.com/treeash is the MySpace digs of Henry Baum, a solo if not slightly solitary novelist-songwriter(!) whose player offers up nine indie-pop tracks from his debut album from 2001, “Living Room.”

The album was recorded on an 8-track rig – at where else? – at HisSpace – a Los Angeles living room. Baum wrote all of the plaintive and poetic words and music, and plays all the instruments in an unpretentious, low-fi style – think Kurt Cobain fronting Love Tractor or Sebadoh during a sunny, beery jam session during a power failure. I also hear Evan Dando and Elliott Smith lurking in there too, but after a bit more teething on Eno, GBV, the Velvets, and the Zombies (all are listed among Baum’s influences). This is honest music that sounds like it was made by a once-uncool kid with uncommonly cool closet tastes. Music played by someone who loves listening to a lot of stuff.

Part soundtrack to an imaginary Dan Clowes comic (Clowes created “David Boring” and “Ghost World”), the songs from “Living Room” find Baum (or H. Baum as he bills himself, though I keep wanting to call him Aitch Bomb) making naturalistic sweet-and-sour acoustic pop that, as slight as it may seem, gets into my head the way pre-Green REM used to. It also gets in there like a therapist, which is certainly a reason I listen to music to begin with.

Is Baum laid back? Not completely. Don’t mistake the spartan “room divider of sound” feel of “Living Room” as indicating a beatnik-hippie mellowness … I can hear his up and down moods swinging like a metronome inside the melodies, and detect razors of regret, the pump of a busted heart, and even the rippling heat-glow of sexual as well as other present and future tensions. Strangely, all this agita makes me feel good – if only for the moments I’m listening, but that’s what it’s all about, right?

There is a slight tentativeness to the music, like the tunes came to him first, and the lyrics are shyly unsure of their connection to the chords. But the slight imbalance is interesting – it’s like talking to a girl you like … I mean really like … when you’re 14. As many doubts as you have, you feel that something good can happen if you hang in there.

Baum’s voice is a fragile, but never cloying, warble. Which suits the melodies and general anxiety of the material well. The best songs – “Down the Rabbit Hole,” Succeed or Fold” – have what I can describe as a “pop haunt” about them. Melancholia shot through with an odd catchiness culled from a few hundred spins of Mercury Rev or Magnetic Fields. Sorta crunchy and crush-resistant too, like ash wood (hmm….).

And boy, are the lyrics clever … without ever being ponderously over-crafted or quirky to a fault (remember, Aitch is a novelist, a real writer). They demand that you listen through to the end. They’re as simple as this refrain from “Succeed or Fold”:

Time I say/I won’t grow old/Because in time/I’ll succeed or fold

And as poetically enriched as this verse from “Down the Rabbit Hole,” an inspired riff on a friend’s suicide note left in one of Baum’s notebooks while Baum was away (the friend didn’t do it, BTW):

Down the hatch
Eggs don't last
I'll take you to paradise
but don't get attached
Woe to him
who thinks he's unhinged
then opens doors to places
but will not let you in.

Are any of us the people we’re “cracked up” to be, the song asks. Yes and no.

Getting his music online via direct-to-your-ear channels like MySpace makes sense to Baum. “I have faith that my songs are going to connect with someone out there,” says Baum. “I have to keep plugging away, like I’m on tour. Except I don’t have to drive four hours to play for nine people.”

Baum quotes Flaming Lip frontman Wayne Coyne on the same subject: “So many people ask, doesn’t the music scene suck now? I don’t think it does at all! I think it’s wonderful! The Internet has created so much great opportunity. A band can make an album, and put it out there, you don’t even have to wait to be signed. You put it out there, and you don’t know, one person can hear it, or millions! For music, these are the best times that have ever existed!”

So what’s up with the moniker Ash Tree? Baum ‘splains: “ … H. Baum. H sounds something like ‘Ash’ in French and Baum means ‘tree’ in German. That’s it … I like the idea of a tree that’s made of what it is when it burns away. Sounds pretty zen, or something darker, probably both. Something that is dying and growing at once.”

And he makes music about growing and dying a little every day. The songs speak for themselves, but they also weep, smile, laugh, love, hate, and crack up. Stripped down strumming and drumming meeting raw emotion that’s worth your attention span.

-fin-

-LB

http://www.myspace.com/treeash