Chris Thile - "Deceiver"(Sugar Hill, 2004) * * * * *

The Music
Chris Thile - "The Wrong Idea"
Chris Thile - "Locking Doors"
Chris Thile - "I'm Nowhere and You're Everything"

Chris Thile has long been known to the bluegrass community as an avant garde free thinking musician bent on bringing the genre into the new millennium in style. Many appreciate his creative stylistic flair evident in music from his contemporary bluegrass band Nickel Creek, while others want him burned at the stake for destroying an honorable genre. It's difficult to deny that he's an astonishing creative presence in the midst of a musical community hellbent on staying a century in the past.

But this, Deceiver, is not Nickel Creek. That is evident by the end of "The Wrong Idea," which opens as a traditional bluegrass number, then morphs midway into a crunchy rock number in which Thile sings about what his friends would think if he arrived in the morning with the girl he spent the whole night talking with. "I'm nineteen," he sings, "and I've kissed two girls, that's all. You're sixteen and you're one, is that against the law?" As the song develops to rock operatic proportions, he mourns the potential loss of his "good guy" reputation in the eyes of the world. It's a track that doesn't overstay its welcome. The song is lyrically and aurally complex for a piece less than three minutes in length. The song can be heard repeatedly and something different stands out on each listen. Impressive indeed from an arrangement standpoint.

The album's depth grows from there. "Locking Doors" is a funky number that blends bluegrass, blues and jazz into an upbeat groove decrying closed-mindedness in life. The song's protagonist, Marvin, keeps locking all his doors lin life (broken down into three acts: 1) describing his homophobia, 2) describing his religious contradictions, 3) describing his need to look hardcore, ironic since he's afraid to ever try anything new). It's another track that is almost operatic in its scope, and though Thile could have become pretentious and condescending, he instead comes off as lyrically introspective.

To add further depth to his opus, Thile hits us with the best track of all in "I'm Nowhere and You're Everything," which is both the most "bluegrassy" and most original track on the entire CD. A masssive track in its scope, he sings of his personal self-voyeuristic qualities as a songwriter:

I came from California with
An appetite for my own myths
Of music, love and what they mean
I'm told it's borderline obscene

while contrasting this with his partner's struggle to escape a world of stifling religious conservatism:

You came from Illinois with a
Cup of your very own to sip
Never on route for very long
Just there or doing something wrong
Or so your friends and parents said
But if you hadn't you'd be dead

The whole song comes together in the quick-as-a-bullet chorus, in which both his and her stories come together in a biblical context:

I could write a song and have the Lord
Put you and me in a cup he tries to pour
Out looking in at the passengers from the wing
I'm nowhere and you're everything

It's a stunningly evocative piece, both an impressive aural soundscape and a personal lyrical journey. This is another song that may take more than just a singular listen to sink in. Something which could be said of the entire album, thirty-four minutes of intense musical joy that requires rapt studious attention to detail in order to fully appreciate it.

Chris Thile is an emerging artist we all should follow intensely. If Deceiver is a prediction of the direction he wants to take with his solo career, coupled with what he's already done in crafting Nickel Creek's own pioneering sound, it becomes difficult to fathom what could come from his mind in the future. Deceiver is one of the best albums released on a major label in years, and it's only regrettable that I hadn't heard it sooner. I'm sure you'll feel the same way once you let the music into your head.