Ryan's Patrick Watson Review

In 2002, my wife (who was my girlfriend at the time) and I went on a brief vacation to New York. As part of our attempt to get as full of a “New York City experience” as possible, we visited some of the major art galleries in the city. One of them (which I think was the Whitney, but I can’t say for sure) featured a sonic installation; a local artist had recorded a bunch of sounds from the roof of his Brooklyn apartment building, and then stitched them together to create a sonic collage. The end result was a bizarre, fascinating experience to listen to.

This brings us, in a very roundabout way, to Patrick Watson. Watson’s not from Brooklyn, nor does he create avant-garde sound collages, but listening to his album Wooden Arms created the same feeling in me that I had in that New York art gallery: the feeling of being surrounded by a meticulously organized soundscape.

“Soundscape” is one of those words that gets misused a lot, I think, but it’s one that definitely belongs to this album – listening to it creates a sense of an organic, lush surrounding that is sort of happening around you as you’re listening to it. As a result, there’s not a lot of stand-out singles on the album (except for the tracks Beijing and the title track), but that’s not really what it’s trying to be, so you can’t really judge the album by taking a song at random and listening to it – you need to get the full context of the album in order to get a feel for what’s going on.

One of the interesting things about reviews albums like these Polaris nominees is that it really drives home the question of what makes for a good album – is it a collection of good songs, or is it something that needs to exist as a narrative, cohesive whole? You arguably get a more artistic experience from the full-album approach, but it makes it harder for someone not familiar with an artist to try them out. That lack of accessibility can be a big barrier in today’s mp3 driven world, but it’s nice to know that there’s people out there still making albums like this one.