Who is Joe Abernethy?

Vancouver’s Joe Abernethy previously appeared in Music Picks in this column about Ed Askew's Rainy Day Songs, which Abernethy released last year on his Spinning Gold Records label. As I wrote at the time, Abernethy himself was responsible for one of the finest albums I heard in 2007, a lugubrious oddity called College Grove. On July 14, Abernethy finally releases his follow-up, The World Outside the Window.

Once again, I have almost no information about Mr. Abernethy outside of the insights his newest disc offers, or the Youtube window inside his world you can find at the Spinning Gold website. I just spent the last 90 minutes there, grooving on the man's particular flavor of pop cultural archeology. There are clips of Marlon Brando presenting an anguished, thoughtful portrait of himself to Dick Cavett, Groucho Marx hijacking an interview with Truman Capote, and Serge Gainsbourg breathily singing the praises of his adolescent daughter Charlotte.

Similarly linked without comment or context (sort of like his music), you’ll also find snippets from Robert Downey Sr.'s berserk satire Putney Swope, Bill "The Balloon Man" Morrison evidently suffering an on-camera breakdown, and a still from Elliott Gould's outrageously entertaining turn as Philip Marlowe, in Robert Altman's version of The Long Goodbye.

It's wonderful stuff, and it's added some pleasing contours to the mental profile I've built of Joe Abernethy, who has acquired an almost Pynchon-sized mystique for me at this point (which isn't really fair. The truth is, I probably get out even less then he does).

A clip of Liza Minelli performing a bizarre Giorgio Moroder-Tin Pan Alley collision called "Losing My Mind" arguably points the way back to The World Outside the Window. In contrast to the handsomely arranged and executed chamber pop of College Grove, Abernethy's newest disc is characterized by occasionally on-the-fritz, retro-electronica wedded to the singer-songwriter's typically dolorous vocals and brainily romantic lyrics. The governing rule appears to have Abernethy pushing everything to extremes. "True Love" isn't just sombre; it sounds like a church. "For Every Last Betrayal" is wilfully unbalanced with intrusive sound effects, dialogue scraps, chants, out-of-time jazz samples, screaming sax, and an uproariously vinegary guitar solo.

Equally, there's a bone-dry sense of humour at work in the one-minute fugue "I Spent the Day Alone", which ends with the declaration, "Yesterday in a Siddharthic grove I renounced my wealth". Or "Zelda", which opens with Abernethy moaning, “This is dreadful..." over sonorous piano. The final, brazenly emotive and wordless two minutes sound like a way less manipulative Angelo Badalmenti.

Personally, I find the whole thing fascinating, and quite beautiful in places, as in the Vangelis-like "Cold Pop". The World Outside the Window then exits on a somewhat more penetrable note with a song that might have dropped off of College Grove. "Weaving Hope and Despair" counts as your reward for sticking with the fluttery interior dramas that precede it, entering the frame on a warm and lovely harmonica overture that sounds like something by John Barry. Ed Askew himself appears for a verse, a nod to friendship as much as it might serve as Abernethy's tribute to the older artist. Indeed, The World Outside the Window feels like it might have been influenced by Askew's hermetically sealed four-decade-plus work of musical autobiography.

Whether I'm right about that or not, the album is confident, fully formed, challenging, and perverse in ways I absolutely didn’t expect. Which makes me think I was right about the guy to begin with.

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