Eddie Chacon
Lay Low
★★★★
STONES THROW
“Most of my career I’d just been this incredible force of ego,” Eddie Chacon told MOJO, back in 2020. “I was this delusion of cool, trying to prove something. I wanted to let go of all that.”
The music Chacon made on that year’s solo debut, Pleasure, Joy And Happiness, was all about letting go. Not just the letting go of ego but the release of years of pain, sadness and grief that had pushed him to the edge of depression. It was also about a soul singer stripping away the protective tropes and constructs of his genre.
Compare the music he made as a young man, as part of the ’90s pop-soul duo Charles & Eddie, with the minimalist songs of gauzy declaration he created on that album with Solange and Frank Ocean producer John Carroll Kirby and you’d be hard-pressed to recognise it as the same artist.
However, that stripping way was relatively short-lived and on 2023’s follow-up Sundown, also recorded with Kirby, there was the distinct feel of the duo gilding the lily, adding live percussion, brass, woodwind and shoals of electronic effects to create an almost oppressive atmosphere of muddy jazz-funk in which Chacon’s melancholy vocals had little space to move.
“With your sophomore effort your only goal is to get out of your own way,” Chacon said recently. He was talking about Charles & Eddie but he could so easily have been referencing Sundown. Perhaps that is the reason Kirby suggested Chacon and he part company and the singer work with Brooklyn-based psych-soul artist/producer Nick Hakim.
The results, recorded in Brooklyn over two years, are something of a revelation. Referencing the late-’60s and early-’70s minimalist soul of Little Beaver, Timmy Thomas and Sly Stone’s Stone Flower Productions label, tracks driven by primitive Rhythm King and Rhythm Ace drum machines, Hakim and Chacon have pulled production back to something resembling the spartan melancholic landscapes of Pleasure, Joy And Happiness. But what they’ve added is equally important.
Lay Low is a kind of concept album, built around love, grief and bereavement, Chacon in conversation with himself.
On previous solo records, Chacon believed he was “running away from my past” yet all the while convincing himself he was in control. As his confidence returned, however, he made a decision: to revisit both his love of ’70s soul harmonies and his own refusal to confront the death of his mother, Patricia, from Alzheimer’s, nine years ago.
So, what we get with Lay Low is a kind of concept album, an austere Here, My Dear/Belle Album but one built around love, grief and bereavement, Chacon in conversation with himself, reworking R&B chord structures and multi-tracking his own vocals in the style of those ’70s soul classics.
Opening track, Good Sun, begins with simplistic drum machine rhythms, distant swirling synths and muted, discordant guitar before Chacon sings, in forlorn falsetto about, “Always searching for the good sun”, a phrase his late mother used about finding the warmest place in the house. The other repeated phrase in this bare-bones song is, “I just miss you home” and it’s a phrase that defines the other central theme of Lay Low, that of a displaced, restless older man trying to find a place of security in the world. The second track, Let You Go, is pure mid-’70s Marvin Gaye; seductive, harmonic and weird, a love song that might also be about an inability to cope in the modern world, Hakim’s stark production style serving to reveal the flimsiness of Chacon’s emotional foundations. As his gossamer multi-tracked vocals interweave with each other you fear for the man, knowing there is only the most fragile of safety nets beneath him.
That idea becomes explicit on track three, Empire (Feat. John Carroll Kirby). It’s a joyous jazz-funk groove, Earth Wind And Fire in reduced circumstances, in which those muted Sundown horns make a rare reappearance but in service of a song about insomnia, inarticulacy and the realisation that, “Everything we have is like an empire that we built upon the sand.” The songs are no longer about Chacon’s mother but have, you realise, allowed him access to something more truthful and darker within himself.
Within that context, the title track is Chacon the existentialist, thinking about a way to carry on. Against echoing voices, distant cries and empty-room piano, he sings, “I don’t want to give up/I don’t want to walk away… Maybe we’re just livin’”, before repeating the mantra, “lay low/lay low.” It’s a track that only really makes sense nestled against the floating, ethereal beat-less Birds, in which Chacon compares old age to the life of a bird: “You see things before they happen… When you’re so close to heaven/You can forget what is real.” Both tracks are, it seems, an artist admitting that the only way to survive life is to distance yourself from it, but no reasons are given until the next brace of songs, Let The Devil In and End Of The World. The first is a kind of psychedelic Al Green drum machine gospel, Chacon seemingly trapped within a looped mechanistic sample singing about how, “We’re so hurried… We let the devil in… And it’s tearing me apart.” He might be singing to a loved one, but he might also be singing for all of us about the malaise of the modern world, a world moving so fast that it’s hard to tell just who we’ve invited into it. By the time of the apocalyptic slow-jam End Of The World, there is no equivocation. The groove might be I Want You-era Marvin Gaye but the message is one wreathed in depression and despair: “Feel I’m losing ground/Everything I think and feel is so wrong… Feel like the end of the world as we know it.”
And if Chacon has a message for survival, it’s a double-edged one, bound up in the album’s final track, If I Ever Let You Go. Sun-warped, eerie, yet utterly light and soulful, it’s a commitment to another to “never let you go” but also a plea to that individual: “Don’t go”. Whether it’s Chacon’s lover, mother, or the devil he let in on track six, is unclear, but the song plays less like a seduction than a confession; that however he decides to carry on, he can’t do it by himself. There is, of course, another reading. That the other is us, the listener. He needs us and, on the evidence of Lay Low, we need him.
Lay Low is out January 31 on Stones Throw.
ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV
TRACKLISTING:
Good Sun
Let You Go
Empire ft. John Carroll Kirby
Lay Low
Birds ft. Nick Hakim
Let The Devil In
End Of The World
If I Ever Let You Go
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Picture: DeMarquis McDaniels