The Miracle of St. Lenox

Also: New Albums from the Wallflowers and the Umbrellas

St. Lenox: Ten Songs of Worship and Praise for Our Tumultuous Times. (Don Giovanni Records). You're out of gas, out of money, out of food, no GPS, no map, beyond hope. You walk five miles on aching feet with holes in your shoes to an almost empty rural church. There is one man at the lectern, and he is reciting psalms you've never heard in a sing-song voice that sometimes shakes you like a punch in the gut. He elongates syllables at the end of lines like an ecumenical cantor with a beautiful voice reading from the Torah, or a mellifluous clergyman making up his own gospel based on King James.

            This more than slightly hip and self-aware preacher is Korean-American musician and lawyer Andrew Choi, who performs as St. Lenox. He not only asks the big questions: life and death and afterlife, the quest for meaning, the existence or not of god, whether religion has a purpose, whether his father was wise after all, whether he and his husband will make good parents...he also offers answers. All this while also observing, and enjoying, a middle of the night visit to a 24 hour supermarket in a midwestern storm, in "Kroger Twilight":

Cougars with their box wine,

            College boys making mischief,

            Bundled up in winter jackets

            Cause its howling outside.

            "The Great Blue Heron (Song of Solomon)" ponders childhood innocence while stuck in a subway commuting from the law firm at which he works in Rockefeller Center trying to get home to Brooklyn. Choi was musical child prodigy (going to Julliard on weekends while in school in the midwest), growing up in a Korean-American family. Like many kids, he yawned through church. But in "Deliverance," he talks about aging and being confronted with the death of a close friend for the first time:

But now that I'm 40, in the middle of my life

Talkin’ ‘bout stuff like taxes and inheritance.

Serious subjects for a fresh attorney

Unschooled in the heavy poetry of religion.

            The instrumentation is spare; it's mostly Choi bringing forth appropriately churchy sounds from keyboard. Though not religiously observant, he certainly observes religion, thinks about its role in his life and the lives of others: "Bethesda" is about a Presbyterian church his family attended in Ames, Iowa, and the experience was not altogether unpleasant: The pastor "tells me to shake hands with all my neighbors/I am your neighbor." Then, there's a pause, and he concludes, "That’s how we roll at Bethesda Lutheran."  

            My favorite is about a group of friends who regularly get together at a bar, but one of them is late: "Arthur is at a Shiva." To console Arthur, Choi sings, "you know that it's just a change, yeah, I've heard that it's just a change." You don't know if he believes it; he knows words of consolation tend to be boilerplate, and whether death is "just a change" is something for which the living can never know.

            Choi sees a kinship between Jews and Koreans. So do I. In the video to "Arthur is at a Shiva," he bakes a hybrid Challah.

            Also, this is a true story. I got my Pfizer vaccines at the Korean Community Center in Bayside, Queens (KCC). It was a pop-up site some useful local politicians did just for our community. The KCC is in the former Bayside Jewish Center. There are still pews from the synagogue and its original stained glass windows representing scenes from the Jewish Old Testament. I thought, wow, what a place for St. Lenox to do a small concert.

            There is something healing about this album. Remember the church into which you walked, at the end of your luck? Such is the transformative power of listening to Choi, St. Lenox, is that when you are finished hearing him preach, you walk outside this isolated church. Your car is there waiting, freshly washed. Your wallet is thick with $20 bills, the gas tank is full, you've eaten a banquet, banjan, kimchee, roast chicken with Korean pancakes, challah, and been given clear directions home.

The Wallflowers: Exit Wounds (New West). I've always rooted for Jakob Dylan, and all of his siblings, for that matter. We don't get to choose our parents, but if we could, I would not want Bob Dylan to be my dad, for reasons prosaic and profound. It takes special courage to enter the family business, that is, writing and performing songs, so Jakob must be made of sturdy stuff to maintain the career he has had. The Wallflowers are Jakob's band, and in the 1990s they were a  great one: Their 1996 album Bringing Down the Horse had two songs, "One Headlight" and "6th Avenue Heartache," that still sound inspirational, and with the contemporaneous Counting Crows, they revitalized mainstream rock after the death of Kurt Cobain, and gangsta rap crossed over from the city to teenage mall kids.

            The Wallflowers is now mostly a brand name: Exit Wounds is more a Jakob Dylan solo project. Producer Butch Walker is also the multi-instrumentalist, on everything from guitar to percussion who supports Dylan on these tracks. And the bass player is the mastering engineer with the look-twice name Whynot Jensveld.

            You might also call it a Nashville record, or a NashAngeles one, recorded in Santa Monica. Maybe it's the presence of country singer-songwriter Shelby Lynne on four tracks, especially on "Darlin' Hold On," where she takes a solo verse, and trades lines, adds harmonies, makes her presence essential. She could record it and release it on her own.

            The idea of home is sort of a fungible concept on Exit Wounds, on which almost every song mentions some form of public transportation, trains, buses, and boats. Everyone is going away or coming home, or wants to leave or isn't sure they want to stay: The exit wounds are existential. It even becomes a bit supernatural on "Move the River," one of Jakob's best and most ingenious songs since the 1990s, a song that would fit nicely on Bringing Down the Horse. The whole mood of the record is summed up by "I Hear the Ocean (When I Wanna to Hear Trains)," a theme for our not-quite-post-Covid moment.

The Umbrellas (Slumberland). It is important to understand that some time before the Sunday, August 1 print edition of the New York Times Sunday Arts section, (online July 26) TV critic James Poniewozik licked his finger, held it in the air to see which way the prevailing winds were blowing, and came to the conclusion that television is now in an era...a period...a something, and that something is Sincerity, having moved on from irony. He writes:

            By “irony” here, I don’t mean the popular equation of the term with cynicism or snark. I mean an ironic mode of narrative, in which what a show “thinks” is different from what          its protagonist does.

The title: "How TV Went From David Brent to Ted Lasso." Ricky Gervais' and The Office are out; Jason Sudekis as Ted Lasso, with its 20 Emmy nominations, are in. This establishment of naming norms in entertainment has been a function of the New York Times since the days of his eminence Bosley Crowther, the Times film critic from 1940-1967. Imagined Crowther think- piece post-Pearl Harbor: "For some reason, war movies are making a comeback."

If I wanted to support Poniewozik's argument with music, I would point to the unrelenting sincerity in the music of The Umbrellas. The quartet from San Francisco had a very brief inconspicuous history before The Umbrellas (release date August 6, 2021) is released. Also, there is one woman singer and one male singer, and the woman singer is named Morgan Stanley. Like the investment bank. The men in the group are Matt, Nick, and Keith. Release information from Slumberland, modest to a fault, doesn't even mention the band members or their roles, and a preview in the Brooklyn Vegan did not come with much information either.

So Morgan, a fine singer, and a male singer or singers, none of whom sing very well, trade lead vocals, sometimes making an effort at harmony, sometimes not. Her voice is the superior one in the group, and "She Buys Herself Flowers," her song, is the album's best, with the kind of low-key non-intensity that made the Scotland group Belle & Sebastian such a delight. She sings a song about the city, called "City," as she takes in the city "on my bike." This is undoubtedly true: the band's sincerity is of the type that draws city-bicycle advocates. Which can be tough peddling amid the hills of San Francisco, but never mind.

There is nothing wrong with your computer. The video is a series of photocopies.

There is no posing here. "Lonely," the opening song, is about being lonely, and it is also the best song that male singer sings, just in terms of vocal pleasantness. "Happy" is about being happy, right down to the "la-la-la's." "Autumn" is autumnal, "Summer" is summery. "It's True" sounds truthful. "Pictures" has a little more ambition, very slightly reminiscent of Love's "She Comes in Colors," (from Da Capo, 1966), as if they've heard the song but are trying to reconstruct it from memory.

The salient song here is the mournful "Never Available," a generational anthem for a generation that goes through entire relationships, some lengthy, with the couple never meeting, but text dating, connecting or failing to connect, through text messages. If you're stuck in one of those, first of all, stop it! Stop looking at your damn phone. Then, listen to this album. Tweet or Tinder someone who also likes the Umbrellas. You will feel better. Hope springs eternal.