“The Crook of My Good Arm“
from the album Black Forest (Tra La La)
2008
iTunes
I love the musical and lyrical drama that Madison’s Pale Young Gentlemen manage to pack into not even three minutes here. We first hear only a cello, playing a jerky line with what sounds like a mysterious rhythm until we understand that it’s actually just accelerating into the right tempo for the song. Kinda fun. A crisp acoustic guitar joins in, and a violin (or maybe a viola? or both?). By the time front man Mike Reisenauer sings those not-your-typical-indie-fare opening lines — “You start to worry ’bout your health/As you reach a certain age” — this song has achieved liftoff (aided by a drum that enters with exquisite timing).
And it’s really only just starting; the rest of the way, “The Crook of My Good Arm” all but explodes with melodic vigor and instrumental dexterity: the strings play rascally melodies and rhythms, a cowbell clangs at precisely the right moments, and Reisenauer, his voice vaguely processed, handles the theatrical rhyme scheme (check out the spiffy A-B-C-C-B pattern in the verse, leading into the titular phrase) with the casual authority of someone who’s more interested in telling a story than simply singing. Sounding nothing like rock bands that are typically associated with the word, I’d say that Pale Young Gentlemen (a seven-person outfit that includes by the way three women) possess great swagger. This isn’t “Wail on the electric guitar and scream bloody murder” swagger or “Dig my blues riff and my street cred” swagger or even “Be awed by my laptop skills” swagger — it’s “We know exactly what we’re doing and don’t really sound like anyone else” swagger. The best kind, in other words.
“The Crook of My Good Arm” is a song from the band’s second CD, Black Forest (Tra La La), which will be released in October on the Madison-based label Science of Sound.