Despite his day job with Fleet Foxes, J. Tillman is not a man of peaceful, easy feelings. His solo albums are muted, grave, and of a single, sepia-toned piece: his husky, trembling voice, his acoustic guitar, and a pervading sense of nearly medieval severity. The characters in Tillman's songs bring to mind photographs of unsmiling Depression-era families, people too busy coping with drought or fending off consumptive disease to do much more. Singing Ax is his seventh full-length album, and it is one of his grimmest and sparest yet, sucked dry of even the pastoral grace that lightened 2008's Vacilando Territory Blues.
The bleak tone is established from the opening dirge "Three Sisters", in which Tillman moans about hallucinatory night visions over a slowly ticking guitar vamp. The production is vividly stark, drawing your ears to the sound the pads of his fingertips make as they lightly drum the body of his guitar. It is a measured, somber song, and the rest of the record proceeds apace. The album's title is apt, not just for the hint of menace the image contains but for the appreciation of yeoman's work it implies: You can almost hear the methodical whistle and thunk of the blade cleaving wood in the record's grave, prayerful progression.
"Prayerful" is not an incidental world choice: There is a lot of religious imagery in J. Tillman's music, and Singing Ax is no exception. The pensive open-string drone of "Diamondback" hinges on Biblical serpent imagery, while "Mere Ornaments" opens with the apocalyptic vision of a "pale moon at the end of days." What distinguishes Singing Ax from its predecessors, though, is its startling and sharp turn into Freudian territory. "One Task" and "Our Beloved Tyrant" locate their power in some fairly twisted familial drama. "I had one task in our home/ I had to draw water from the well for my father's horse/ I was the least among my brothers/ And I would be the last among them to hold the reins," Tillman bleakly sings in the opening of "One Task". "Our Beloved Tyrant" is even darker, with Tillman bitterly addressing a father figure whose reign of terror over his home is seemingly on the wane: "it's true, you strike me as less godlike with no son to crucify," he mutters. It brings to mind Daniel Day-Lewis's "bastard in a basket" speech at the end of There Will Be Blood, with Tillman playing the role of pale-faced H.W., and it taps into some of the same elemental power.
