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Reviews

The Gatekeepers — The Gatekeepers
(Bandcamp Think Like a Key TLAK1136, 2022, CD / LP / DL)

by Jon Davis, Published 2024-07-31

The Gatekeepers Cover art

Occasionally a new release comes along that is really baffling. The Gatekeepers certainly qualifies. This is a narrative concept album, a rock opera if you will, with the caveat that it is rock only in a general way — musically it leans more towards avant chamber music at times. The album tells the story of The Artist, a musician with a day job who is interested in creating distinct, unusual, creative work without regard to commercial considerations, and also interested in actually making a living. This leads to a series of encounters with gatekeepers who protect access to the more lucrative levels of the music business: the vice chair of a local arts council, a “moody industry veteran,” a wealthy venture capitalist who might invest in something artistic, a well-known critic, and finally, “The Algorithm” that determines what gets played. Frustrated at every level, The Artist faces a terrible but inevitable choice: compromise and make a living or stay true to the art and languish in the day job. The parts of the various characters of the journey are played by many of the stars of our niche avant market, including Cheer-Accident, The Residents, Amy Denio, Renaldo M., Shawn Phillips, Elaine di Falco, Mont Campbell, Amy Denio, Deborah Perry, Bob Drake, R. Stevie Moore, and more. Composer Alex Wroten contributes various instruments, and he’s assisted on a track-by-track basis by Dave Willey, Matthew Parmenter, Morgan Ågren, Duncan Mackay, Don Britton, Emily Hay, Frederic l’Épée, Paul Lai, Bill Brovold, and others. The album really needs to be taken as a whole, as the individual tracks really only work as part of the story. While the idea of an artist struggling to maintain integrity in the face of a money-hungry music industry is hardly new, Wroten’s tale brings it into a modern era (though it could sound obsolete in a few years — who knows?), and enlisting such an impressive group of collaborators is quite a coup. Certainly none of them has reason to be unhappy about the result, as it’s full of imagination and clever turns of phrase. It’s a fair shake more accessible than many of The Residents’ concept albums, but still quite a ways out on the quirky scale.

Filed under: New releases, 2022 releases

Related artist(s): Morgan Ågren, Cheer-Accident, Elaine Di Falco, Dave Willey, The Residents, Amy Denio, Bob Drake, Dirk (Mont) Campbell, Shawn Phillips, Various Artists, Bill Brovold, Frédéric l'Épée, The Gatekeepers, Emily Hay, R. Stevie Moore

More info
http://thinklikeakey.bandcamp.com/album/the-gatekeepers-2

 

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