UNDERRATED ALBUMS # 4

‘a gloriously giddy celebration
of falling in love.’

Invincible Summer (2000)
by K. D. Lang

Most people probably only know two things about K. D. Lang: 1) that she is a Country artist, and 2) that she is a lesbian. Ironically, both of these facts have long since ceased to be particularly relevant when discussing Katy Dawn Lang as a singer and songwriter. Indeed, they are no more significant than details such as her being Canadian, Buddhist or vegetarian. Lang’s live audience may still predominantly reflect her strong female and lesbian fan-base, but her records deserve to reach far beyond such parameters.

What really matters about her is that she is markedly the best female pop singer to emerge since Dusty Springfield. Lang is more of an album-artist than Springfield, who is chiefly known for her string of hit singles during the 1960s. Although she has hits in her native Canada, Lang rarely troubles the singles charts elsewhere. She achieved crossover success eight years into her recording career with Ingenue (1992), on which she collaborated with co-writer, co-producer and backing musician, Ben Mink. The album included what have become her signature songs, ‘Miss Chatelaine’ and ‘Constant Craving’. It is, however, the sinuous mingling of country, pop and eastern tones that made the record so distinctive, with Mink’s Asiatic violin and viola playing blending seamlessly with steel guitars, exotic percussion and the sensuality of Lang’s singing.

Fittingly released during the first summer of a new century, Invincible Summer is a gloriously giddy celebration of falling in love. Neither as successful commercially or critically as Ingenue, it is certainly a record that warrants reappraisal. It features a different backroom team (although Mink reappears, contributing violin on ‘Love’s Great Ocean’, which he co-wrote). Taking its defiantly optimistic title from a quotation by Algerian novelist and philosopher, Albert Camus - ‘In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer’ - the album’s cover is full of out of focus, sun-dazzled, extreme close-ups of Lang on a beach. The images aptly reflect the blur of heightened emotional sensation that shimmer through the eleven songs.

Producer Damian LeGassick, who arranges the brass and strings, conjures a dreamy atmosphere with subtle, liquid electronica warmly mixed in with the guitars, bass and drums, all of which compliment the sustained romance of the lyrics. Generally avoiding cliché, the words, benefiting from the clarity of Lang’s diction, map out the  perils and pleasures of embarking on a new love affair.

Opener, ‘The Consequences Of Falling’ finds Lang teetering on the brink before surrendering to her ‘new fun thing’ and the ‘uncommon breeze [which] did with our hearts whatever it pleased’, blowing through the delightfully bouncy ‘Summerfling’. The tempo slows with a simple cornet figure straight out of Bacharach and a cautionary sense of déjà vu in ‘Suddenly’ which finds the narrator ‘thinking I might have been here before / My only distraction is the attraction that I’m dying to explore’.

By the time the programme reaches its two strongest songs, ‘Extraordinary Thing’ (‘since you came waltzing in’) and ‘When We Collide’, with their intense, passionate choruses, the relationship has reached its zenith. In between, the music is gently sensual and the imagery intoxicating: ‘Here is the ocean I’m longing to be streaming into’ (‘Love’s Great Ocean’); ‘love, as a philosophy, is simple / I am calm in oblivion’ (‘Simple’); and, in the chiming ‘What Better Said’, ‘Why this synthesis whenever you are near? / Truth is delirious in love’s great atmosphere’.

Towards the end of the album, momentary doubts begin to appear: ‘basking in the sun seems dangerous and fun…this infatuation is getting out of hand / In this kind of situation one needs discipline’ (‘Curiosity’). Finally, however, in ‘Only Love’, the singer reconciles herself to the adage that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all:-

                          ‘With every drop of life inside us.

                           With every heart we’ve left behind
                           Everywhere you’ll find it’s
                           Only love brings you back around.’

Approaching her forties when she made Invincible Summer, K. D. Lang was operating in an adult realm way above the teen-dream banalities and crass sexual posturing which were dominating the charts at the time (and, of course, still do). And yet she still managed to capture the emotional and physical feelings of falling in love in a sensitive and sophisticated way on this record. Throughout the songs, she effortlessly creates the effect – as did the likes of Dusty Springfield and Dionne Warwick before her – of floating on top of the music like a seabird riding thermals, or like an olympic gymnast in the dance section uses a streamer to create graceful patterns in the air.

One might say that it’s a classy trick – except that, with singers of this quality, it’s the natural way they inhabit a song, rather than a trick.   And you can, I think, believe that Katy Dawn Lang has really lived this joyously melodic and life-affirming set of love songs. Mature albums full of happy, positive songs don’t come around very often: Invincible Summer shines out among them.   

 

N. B.

Lang has issued two albums of theme-related cover versions: Drag (1997) and Hymns Of The 49^th Parallel (2004), both of which work well as collections. The former is made up of songs more or less about smoking, whilst the latter features material by fellow Canadian songwriters Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Jane Siberry, Leonard Cohen and Ron Sexsmith. Lang’s cover of Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ - a song which became almost ubiquitous some two decades after its original release - is one of the best. Hymns also includes a re-recorded, piano-based version of her own ‘Simple’ from Invincible Summer.