A Thousand Songs' "Introduction" finds Jim Guthrie humbly warbling "I think I'll write/ A thousand songs today" over a handful of thick, grainy strums; six seconds in, Guthrie tumbles off the edge of his kitchen chair, dragging his entire patchy, four-track setup down with him in a dissonant crunch. Introduction complete.
Unsurprisingly, Royal City's Jim Guthrie doesn't exactly fulfill his bombastic (if ill-fated) prophecy, but his solo Three Gut debut does boast twenty-four tracks of scrappy, lo-fi maneuvering, littered with all the bells, whistles, and pings expected of an artist who records his music in an apartment crammed with unnamed noisemakers. A Thousand Songs is seventy-four minutes of artfully pieced together song collages; to the uninitiated, the prospect of wading through it may sound roll-your-eyes exhausting, but, happily, the compilation makes a charming, melodically competent record, peppered with bizarre moments of cut and paste genius.
Guthrie's sparse, handmade works are lucid enough to save themselves from tedium-- the time-tested pitfall of recording shit without a band, producer, or studio-- and he shows an impressive sense of balance and structure, toying with the tension of pairing raw, un-tempered sounds with proficient songwriting. Sometimes blissfully short (could anyone realistically endure more than twenty-five seconds of Guthrie and friends hollering "Rama-lama-ding dong!" and giggling, or placidly tolerate additional samples of someone cawing "Pots and pans!" over-- hey, brilliant match-up here-- the crashing of cookware?), Guthrie's samples are usually perfectly timed for listener appreciation, and coalesce like a poppier, less DJ-minded Fog. Remarkably, A Thousand Songs requires far less patience than might be (rightfully) anticipated from an artist who currently employs a Playstation as a band member/co- songwriter: Guthrie's compositions may be full of noises and unidentifiable hiss, but they're still solidly written songs.
Snippets of found sound and cuts from old records (a quick clip from the Statler Brothers' "Flowers on the Wall," a broke-down cover of Tortoise's "Gamera") mingle peaceably with guitar, drums, keyboards, Playstation-synths, and Guthrie's unadorned vocals. "The Fantabulous" opens with rich, acoustic plucks, Guthrie's modest guitar melody stumbling into a light drum and cymbal crash and then crawling out, rolling through twitchy beats and cycling back through again, building, breaking down, and evening out. "Who Needs What" is a sweet, strikingly sincere acoustic plea, with Guthrie quietly imploring "Don't back down on me now/ I need this/ Go get drunk on me now/ You need this." It's a welcome bit of quiet sentimentality before "Who Needs What" sees Guthrie toss his heart back down, return to form, and holler, "Shit yeah, I can dance!"
Despite being originally released by Three Gut in 1999-- making Guthrie a semi-celebrity with resourceful Canadian critics in 2000-- and earning a re-release by the label in 2002, A Thousand Songs is terrifically hard to track down stateside, unless you frequent Three Gut's website (the label is hoping for U.S. distribution this fall). Guthrie's scrap-heap gig has already been brazenly co-opted by hundreds of crafty, resourceful kids with acoustic guitars and shitty microphones (who probably learned their tricks from a well-worn, heavily-stickered tape of Stereopathetic Soul Manure) and unfortunately, much of what's so unique about this release will, in all likelihood, seem pretty tired by the time it finds its way into the listening booth of your local indie retailer. But Guthrie's work is more honest and artful than much of the over-posed gimmickry-as-music of his peers, and even now, nearly four years after its initial release, A Thousand Songs deserves some attention.
