Vincent & Mr. Green
Ipecac, 2004
rating: 3.5/5
reviewer grigsby


Vincent & Mr. Green is a duo comprised of vocalist Jade Vincent and pianist and keyboardist Keefus Ciancia, a collaborator with the likes of Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Fishbone, and Elvis Costello, as well as the scorer of select scenes from Lady Killers. Their self-titled album conveys Ciancia's knack for the cinematic, though not in the grand orchestral sense. Rather, it calls to mind the domestic surrealism of a David Lynch film.

Fittingly, the album opens with a narrator proclaiming Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is" as her theme song, deftly situating the clash between nostalgia for the American past and awareness of the undeniable sorrow and violence of that past as the overriding theme of the album. "Burn" begins the album with a profound expression of this sentiment with the following line, "I'm telling everyone if your house burns down it wasn't me." Not nearly as menacing in print as on record, the line's delivery boils over with passive aggressive hostility against vaguely familiar and beautifully melancholic music.

While difficult to pin down, the closest parallel that comes to mind is Tricky's Maxinquaye, employing the same sort of postmodern seamless cutting and pasting. However where Maxinquaye has always felt like a personal and traumatic inversion of the familiar, twisting sounds beyond recognition, Vincent & Mr. Green documents a cultural trauma, bringing the well-known sounds of sweeping strings and slide guitars into a dystopian present, but intact enough to be recognizable.

And that's what makes Vincent & Mr. Green such a treat; it stirs up feelings for a past that I did not take part in, and I suspect the artists didn't either. As such, the album comes across as the effort of a couple of obsessive cinephiles and record collectors. However, unlike the usual vapid marketing of nostalgia, Vincent & Mr. Green, or rather Jade and Keefus, show us both the light and dark sides of that imagined past.

1. Prelude
2. Burn
3. Like You
4. Dance
5. Daddy
6. $2. 50
7. Xterlude
8. Red Light
9. Whiskey Bound
10. Will
11. Man
12. Transylvania X
13. Once
14. When We Were We
15. Dance, Pt. 2