Block Out The Sun” (Veritas Records)
By Eleni P. Austin
Victor Krummenacher has been a force on the indie music scene since the early ‘80s. The Riverside native was surrounded by music from an early age. His parents introduced him to the traditional sounds of Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Bobby Darrin and Barbra Streisand, as well as the Folk flavors of Peter, Paul & Mary, Martin Carthy and Simon & Garfunkel.
Of course, the music of Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, and the usual FM Rock staples were ubiquitous throughout the ‘70s. But that never really appealed to him. Thanks to his older sister’s boyfriend, he was turned on to the outlier music of Jonathan Richman, Link Wray, Robert Gordon, Iggy & The Stooges and The Velvet Underground. As Punk Rock began to overtake the L.A. music scene, Viktor fully embraced the primitive cool of X, The Germs, Fear and The Weirdos.
He bought his first bass off Donnie Rose, girlfriend of Germs front-man Darby Crash. During high school, he cycled through a series of Punk bands. Just around the bend in Redlands, David Lowery and Johnny Hickman had started their own nascent bands. Victor quickly recognized their songwriting prowess and began hanging out with them in the early ‘80s. Soon enough, he and David formed Camper Van Beethoven.
The quirky five-piece synthesized a surfeit of styles, juxtaposing elements of Punk, Country, Ska and Folk. Between 1985 and 1989, they released five long-players, two EPs and an odds n’ sods collection before calling it quits in 1990. Concurrently, Victor helmed a side project, The Monks Of Doom.
Out of the ashes of CvB, David joined forces with Johnny Hickman and Victor, roaring back to life as Cracker. Their self-titled 1992 debut broke into the mainstream with their first single, “Teen Angst (What The World Needs Now),” and subsequent records featured hits like “Low,” “Eurotrash Girl” and “Get Off This.” Over the last 30+ years, Cracker has released nine studio efforts, as well as live sets and several compilations. Since 2002, they have toggled between Camper and Cracker projects. 2004 saw the inaugural Camper Van Beethoven/Cracker Camp Out event that takes place every autumn at Pappy & Harriet’s.
Back in 1986, Victor crossed paths with Dave Alvin, who was touring with his band The Blasters. They cemented their friendship a couple of years later when CvB was touring with sui generis songstress Syd Straw. Dave was playing guitar in her band. The pair casually collaborated over the next few years and made it official just ahead of COVID, when they formed The Third Mind.
Somehow, Victor has also made time to launch a solo career. His debut was released in 1995. Over the last 30 years, he has recorded 10 more. Now, he’s released his 12th long-player, Block Out The Sun. A song-cycle of sorts, it plays across eight tracks.
The album opens tentatively with “Time Will Do Us No Favors.” Nimble electric guitar riffs wrap around a pastoral arrangement of spiraling acoustic notes, darting bass lines and a slipstitch beat. Victor’s playful vocals land somewhere between Bruce Cockburn and Greg Brown (sans the latter’s gruff Iowa drawl). Sweetly conspiratorial lyrics hatch a plan for escape: “Meet me down at the edge of the woods, we can disappear into everything good, away from the hands of the ticking clock, we’ll go until we’re long, long gone, we’ll go until we’re long, long gone/Tell me a joke and make it good, the water’s raining down and I’m dying of thirst, you smiled and said it’s gone from bad to worse, and tell me who goes last and who goes first, who goes last and who does first.” The easy camaraderie is magnified by atmospheric keys, shivery strings and reedy organ runs. There’s an effervescent, effortless grace to this song that recalls late ‘60s touchstones like “Wichita Lineman” and “Everybody’s Talkin,’” balanced by just a hint of Capra-esque skepticism: “Well, the bells they toll, the bells they ring, but we’re not ever gonna get our wings, time will do us, time will do us no favors now.”
Courtly acoustic guitars and a well-timed cymbal-splash announce “Race At The Water’s Edge.” Fluttery piano, sylvan strings spidery bass, gilded electric licks and a conga-fied beat brush up against introspective lyrics like “I’m feeling off, I don’t know what it means, it’s just a feeling, a premonition, don’t you tell me you know what it means, I’m okay with the gray, the ambiguity suits my mind, it’s just a feeling, a premonition, ambiguity suits my mind.” Still, he’s persistent: “I’m looking for peace at the water’s edge, just give me peace at the water’s edge.”
On the expansive title track a timpani roll collides with lanky bass lines, luxuriant strings, muted keys and wiry guitar. Across this panoramic vista, Victor wrestles with love, loss and grief. As a rat-a-tat beat kicks in, he has an epiphany of sorts: “I’m staring out from an empty room, I feel the heat, I sense the gloom, but I know just what I’m gonna do, I’ll walk down from the cliffs, to the beach to the shore, jump into a boat with nowhere to go, three clicks of my heels and I’ll be home, to a beauty that I could never define, no matter how high I tried, because there wasn’t a rule that I wouldn’t defy.” Part benediction, part restless farewell, the instrumentation roils and swells, pools and eddies with a majestic finesse, before the song shudders to a close.
“The Horizon Line” is an instrumental that serves as a musical sorbet, a palate cleanser between the heavier courses. Sinewy Weissenborn guitar riffs give way to filigreed acoustic fretwork, thrumming bass lines, a shimmery string section and a chugging beat, A cosmic cousin to Jefferson Airplane’s “Embryonic Journey” and Bert Jansch’s “Blackwaterside,” it conveys a feeling of tenderness and poignance that goes beyond words.
On “Your Last Winter Comes,” splayed guitar licks navigate see-saw strings, boomerang bass and splashy cymbal accents. Victor’s whispery vocals are shadowed by Willie’s choirboy croon. A change of seasons means a time to pause and reflect, as mortality seems to sneak up on us: “I remember the snow, I remember the ice, the Christmas bells ringing at Christmas time, like all things simple, like all things good, what I had for a moment, I misunderstood, and your last winter comes in the blink of an eye.” On the break, a bendy guitar solo is augmented by cascading keys and quicksilver pedal steel, somehow prettying up the inevitable judgement day. The instrumental coda peaks through like sun on a cloudy afternoon. High lonesome pedal steel lines up with mercurial strings and a rumpity rhythm before fading into the sunset.
Stylistically, “The Sky Gone White” takes a hard left. Thick, Spaghetti Western guitar chords ride roughshod across a dense fog of synthesizers. Victor speaks more than sings as lyrics paint a brutish portrait with broad, slashing strokes: “I awoke next to you, I awoke from a dream, somehow you were bleeding and the sky had gone white.”
The album’s final two tracks, “Give Me A Boat To Cross The Sea” and “Hard Times Have Come To Stay,” end the record on an ambivalent note. On the former, plangent acoustic guitar, plaintive piano and drowsy bass lines are bookended by a stutter-step beat. Victor is still searching for peace: “I took the high road, I took the low, I followed them wherever they’d go, down dark highways with forgotten names, through empty towns, past barren plains, but every place they led was just the same,” but it proves elusive. Willowy guitar dovetails with darting piano notes, silvery pedal steel and a staccato rhythm. The last verse feels finite: “Let me go, I’m ready to leave, and I will see what I will see, if there’s anyone there who’s waiting for me, if you give me a boat to cross the sea.”
The latter opens with a soaring, synthesizer fanfare, before winnowing down to strumming acoustic riffs, spectral electric notes, angular bass and an insistent beat. Not-so-cryptic lyrics allude to a failed romance: “Hard times have come to stay, hard times have come to stay, you never thought you’d see the day, but everything you know has changed, and now you’re standing out in the pouring rain.” Midway through, time signatures shift, signaling an added urgency to the proceedings. It’s tempting to presume the final couplet: “You never thought you’d see the day, and everything you know has changed, you’re never going to be the same,” might touch on more global concerns. It’s a pensive finish to wistfully autumnal effort.
This is a solo album in name only. While Victor played guitar, bass, drums, keys, string arrangements and vocals, he relied on old compadres added color and textures. Michael Jerome (Toadies, Richard Thompson, The Third Mind), handled drums and percussion, Willie Aron (The Balancing Act, Thee Holy Brothers, The Dream Syndicate, The Third Mind), added piano, Hammond B-3 and backing vocals and Bruce Kaphan (The Toasters, The Tearjerkers) pitched in on pedal steel, Weissenborn and keys.
Victor Krummenacher has got the goods. But, we’ve always known that. Here, he creates a sound that shapeshifts from sunny technicolor to melancholy monochrome. At once grandly cinematic and deeply intimate, Block Out The Sun is a Moodily elegant effort.
