Idaho

Idaho, a duo from Brentwood, in the Los Angeles hinterland, namely Jeff Martin (singer with a gloomy tenor reminiscent of Leonard Cohen) and John Berry (guitarist and drummer, son of a Hollywood actor, repeatedly jailed for drugs), devoted themselves to a heroin-addled, faint, sparse, and desolate rock, drawing inspiration from Codeine and Seam.

The songs of their Idaho are ectoplasms examined under a microscope and in slow motion; they are imbued with an acute and incurable existential spleen. They had known each other for twelve years but followed different paths before deciding that one’s music and the other’s life could merge perfectly. Only in 1993 did the two thirty-somethings release their first 45 rpm single, Skyscrape (Ringers Lactate), an angelic lullaby that unfolds slowly, like a chrysalis waking sleepily from its cocoon. Other gems from their repertoire appeared on the EP The Palms (Quigley, 1993), notably Creep, which immerses its lipemania in a storm of feedback, and You Are There, a nocturnal and solitary ballad unlike anything Tom Waits ever produced.

The album Year After Year (Quigley, 1993), destined to remain their masterpiece, features hyper-realistic lyrics that capture everyday scenes, seemingly of no interest, but actually metaphors for desperate urban alienation. Idaho’s psalms, propelled by chords that bruise and rhythms that boil, encounter constant hallucinations (Gone, the final moments of a dying man), suffocate in timbral claustrophobia (The Only Road), brush against suicidal depressions (Sundown), and plunge into abysses of absolute emptiness (God's Green Earth). The final five minutes of the long End Game are pure silence. They are odes to social marginality and, not coincidentally, sometimes (Memorial Day) verge on the quietest elegies of Lou Reed. There is no redemption in this world of only defeats, but some form of serenity or resignation is hinted at in Save.

Martin and Berry are poets of the ephemeral, of chimeras, of fading, of the void, of nothingness, of the reflection of a ghost in the morning mist. Their music, compressed between "gloom" and "doom," between Neil Young and Nick Drake, does not exist.

Since Berry relapsed into his old habits, the single Fuel and the album This Way Out (Quigley, 1994) are essentially Martin’s solo works. Martin learned to handle faster tempos. His indolent pessimism now expresses itself equally well in Drop Off and Glow. The mournful threnodies of Drive It and Crawling Out make him a more autumnal Lou Reed. His preferred vehicle remains the very slow lullaby sung with the hazy sweetness of a drugged mind. The exaggerated slow-motion of Taken and Forever, the narcotic, dreamlike sound of Weird Wood, is therefore the true heart of the album, revealing a not-too-distant kinship with Tim Buckley. The most evocative harmonies are found, however, in the delicate chord flow of that sleepy waltz Sweep and in the instrumental for cosmic distortions only, Zabo, which exudes infinite melancholy.

They also released the EP The Bayonet (Fingerpaint, 1995) and the single Pomegranate Bleeding.

On the third album, Three Sheets To The Wind (Caroline, 1996), Idaho finally became a proper band. Martin recruited three permanent musicians and gave them space. Perhaps for this reason, or perhaps because Martin attempted to free himself from the constraints of the "sadcore" he had created, the sound is a little less lethargic than usual, even grunge-like in Catapult and Pomegranate Bleeding. The songs are also more focused. Instead of wandering more or less randomly around the melodic center, the harmonies maintain a reasoned polyphony and a coherent development. With If You Dare, Jeff Martin’s smoky voice attempts yet another Nick Drake imitation. The piano romance Alive Again presents him in a more serious and less plaintive role. Shame demonstrates the glory of his psalms: a casual, lightly jazzy ballad.

Conventional songs are not exactly his strength: any alternative rock band could do better in that field. Martin needs a running start, a calm stretch. His true calling is the five- or six-minute threnody, with a disenchanted tone, off-key strikes, and a narcotic pace: Stare At The Sky, No Ones Watching, or A Sound Awake. The problem is that these tracks are monotonous and not memorable. The album reveals all the limits of the artist—as a singer, guitarist, composer, and arranger.

The effort to elevate his funeral chants to songs is commendable. There is a program of rehabilitation and reintegration hidden behind the music and lyrics of this album. While the ideological background is still that of the desolation of moral values in the post-AIDS city, the tone is no longer that of irrefutable and irreversible decay, but of the regret of a teenager who spent the summer watching friends have fun on the beach from the window.

The EP The Forbidden (Buzz, 1997 – Talitres, 2008) drastically changed course, focusing on melody and rhythm like never before (Bass Crawl, one of their classics, and Golden Seal).

The album Alas (Buzz, 1999) picks up from there, simply refining the arrangements more professionally, approaching a kind of psychedelic chamber music (even the bassoon on Only In The Desert and the violin on Jump Up). Emotional ballads like Yesterday's Unwinding and Leaves Upon The Water make their gloomy lament more listenable.

Nestled in a niche halfway between the pessimistic singer-songwriters of twenty years ago (Nick Drake, Tim Buckley) and the subdued, domestic rockers of New Zealand (Clean, Church), Idaho were destined to represent the antithesis of the carefree folk-rock that once delighted the youth of Los Angeles. With them ends, in short, a historical arc that progressively annihilated the optimism of the 1960s. There is no life in these songs, only a sad and blurred memory of gestures and movements.

Just like Smog and other small-ensemble singer-songwriters, Martin belongs to the neo-depressed movement, continuing the lineage that originated with Tim Buckley and Nick Drake and reached the American Music Club.

On Hearts Of Palm (Idaho, 2000) the piano has become the co-protagonist with the guitar, but hardly anything has changed in Jeff Martin's saga of self-flagellation (Astrida, Hearts Of Palm, Happy Times). Touches of Sonic Youth-ian minimalism (Evolution Is Cold), of Pavement-ian lo-fi pop (Alta Dena) and of Television-esque trance (the instrumental Under) show a widening vocabulary.

Levitate (Idaho, 2001) does not significantly diverge from that path, except possibly for being even more melancholy. Jeff Martin has settled in this genre of subdued acoustic folk that would recall Nick Drake if not for the prominent role of the piano. However, the best song is probably Wondering the Fields, which is also the least spartan.

Vieux Carre' (Kalinkaland, 2005) is even less relevant than its predecessor.