April 1, 2022 - International Anthem
I am brazen, like a baby, like the stupid sun, and I go forward in the courage of my love.
I think artists can feel a lot of pressure to obscure themselves in their work. They’ll hide behind overly poetic language and imagery that confuses us like smoke and mirrors, or they’ll shout biting cynicism, or they’ll write comfortable love songs injected with rare hints of honesty beyond matters of romantic love. They’ll open up about subject matter that someone has decided is safe to be honest about, and not talk about the rest. I’m not always sure exactly why this obfuscation is. I’m sure they have their reasons. I have a hunch they are mainly political. Being an artist is hard because it is your job to explore things people don’t want to explore. And it’s still a job, so most still have to get paid by the people who are afraid to listen and truly hear you.
Every once in a while, though, someone in the music industry is completely fearless and offers us all a gift—open, direct, honest conversation. Something more that music can be. Hard, stabbing questions asked with care. Angus Fairbairn, known musically as Alabaster DePlume, is one of these. A jazz saxophone player and master of the spoken word, Fairbairn builds worlds from the words—the medium crafted for the message. And the words are piercing, so the worlds are sharp but delivered with kindness.
GOLD is an album where Alabaster DePlume explores identity, privilege, prejudice, humanity and love. He openly talks about the things so many of us are afraid to admit—that our society favors some of us over others, that even those of us with the best intentions are at fault of dehumanizing people who are different than we are, dangerous at rest and ever close to an edge of being monstrous. To be better, to enact change, we must constantly be working against an instinct that was crafted by a biased, unjust mechanism. To grow, we must step out from behind the masks we hold onto and look forward with curiosity and radical openness.
Practically speaking, GOLD consists of instrumental interludes that punctuate Fairbairn’s poems of highly charged social introspection. He questions himself, his existence, his place, his behaviors, and a chorus like a Greek play sings and hums and wails underneath him along with his saxophone, adding and subtracting emphasis, carrying us through the concept album from start to end. The instrumentals are emotional and expressive interactions among musicians. They are improvised, folk-like and human, alluding sometimes to spiritual hymns—song as collective medicine, with a jazz saxophone in the room singing earnestly along, birdlike, beautiful. At times it weeps, at times it flies, at times it loses itself in the euphoria of understanding.
Heavy, profound, and introspective, GOLD is going to ask difficult questions of the soul through the lens of Alabaster DePlume’s personal journey. The poetry will make you uncomfortable. Fairbairn is nimble and delivers the weight of his words like fleeting spring petals in the wind—the inevitability of the movement breaks your heart but you’re left with healing warmth. ☔