Brass Trax

If there was any doubt that disco producer, cellist, record label owner, and composer Arthur Russell worked in every conceivable mode of popular music, the new release Love is Overtaking Me should put it to rest.

Russell has a back story that a French novelist would love. A gay man from rural Iowa who moved from one metropolis (San Francisco) to another (New York City), following an artistic lodestar (Allen Ginsburg), harboring his own secret genius that would move people to tears one moment and be forgotten the next, ending with a obscure and tragic death (from AIDS).

Love is Overtaking Me, a release that was culled from the more than 1,000 tapes Russell left behind, complicates the picture somewhat. For one thing, the oldest recording on the disc was made in 1973, six years before he recorded “Go Bang” under the alias Dinosaur L, the first disco 12-inch released by Sire Records. For another, the recordings don’t sound much like New York City music—the disco, the minimalist, fuzzed out pop, and the miniature cello art songs that Russell devotees have come to know.

Listen to “Go Bang”

Instead, Love is Overtaking Me presents Russell with a drawl. It’s a collection of heartland anthems and guitar ballads, albeit sprinkled with Russell’s trademark twisted, open harmonies. It sounds like the farm boy reaching into the forms that he grew up with, striving to carve out the artistic vision that he would later realize with the more experimental forms that he would encounter in the city. (One tune, the languorous “What It’s Like,” even references Russell’s home state.)

The works are not entirely successful, but it’s hard to fault Russell, who was a notorious perfectionist, obsessively and constantly revising his entire body of work. Of his thousand surviving tapes, forty are alternative takes of a single song. The collection’s compilers had the unenviable task of pasting together unfinished work.

The best tracks on the collection, like the cello ballad “Eli,” bring to mind Russell’s other work: shaky, bizarre, and irreducible to basic genre categories. “Habit of You” sounds like a no-mans-land established in the middle of a three way war involving Dire Straits, sixties bliss popsters Free Design and postrock outfit Gastr del Sol. It’s stunning and weird, an unexpected diversion that you would throw onto a mixtape to shake things up.

Listen to “Eli”
Listen to “Habit of You”

The collection doesn’t deliver the out-of-body experience that Russell’s masterpiece World of Echo does. There is no song like “All Boy All Girl” or “Let’s Go Swimming,” where all you get are Russell’s thin voice, an electronically processed cello, and desperation. It lacks the eclectic freshness of Russell’s other miscellanea, like “The Platform and the Ocean,” where a fuzzy and motorik surge of music establishes a pace that Russell’s meandering singing never quite matches. It even lacks the pop immediacy (not to mention the double entendre) of “Is It All Over My Face?” Russell’s 1980 disco hit (recorded under the pseudonym Loose Joints).

Listen to “All Boy All Girl”
Listen to “The Platform and the Ocean”
Listen to “Is It All Over My Face (Male Version)”

Russell has more tapes than Tupac, and his twenty-first century fans will have the joy of experiencing more curiosities like Love is Overtaking Me. It’s a rare opportunity to stare in the underwear drawer of a pop visionary whose skimpy back catalog cannot accommodate the breadth of his genius.

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