It’s inevitable, so let’s start with the obvious. Donnie Darko was a truly beguiling film, capturing the imaginations of geeky film lovers everywhere with plot twists out the ears, killer B-movie references, and one of the best (if, unfortunately, unreleased) soundtracks of the last few years. Darko also was home to one staggering musical moment: the film culminated in a haunting rendition of Tears for Fears’ hit “Mad World” by an obscure singer-songwriter named Gary Jules. The formerly bouncy tune was stripped of its synth trappings and reduced to its basic elements: a far-away piano tinkling out a spare riff and a high, quavering voice elevating the melody to new moody heights. It took one’s breath away, that little cover, and it turned Gary Jules into an “artist to watch”.
Jules is a stocky, tattooed fellow with an impish grin and a soul patch who hides his immense talent snugly under a gray snap-brim cap. He peddled his lovingly crafted tunes in relative obscurity for years, until that exquisite cover — a demo recorded in one hour, if you can believe it — thrust him into the quasi-limelight. Jules’s dues-paying shines through on Trading Snakeoil for Wolftickets, the singer-songwriter’s major label debut. The album fully delivers on the crackling promise of “Mad World” with an accomplished set of hard-won folk-rock.
Trading Snakeoil for Wolftickets hums with the snow-covered calm of a winter evening, its lightly brushed drums and fingerpicked guitars soft and prickly like an afghan blanket. Though a hushed electric guitar or plucky banjo may appear intermittently, the arrangements rarely depart from Jules’s stripped-down folk formula. The songs rarely suffer from this uniformity because, well, that’s just not the point. Jules’s songs have a level of craft and subtlety rarely seen in the rather homogenous contemporary folk landscape; he seems to have missed out entirely on the “edgy” new scene and opted instead to pay homage to his heroes. Echoes of Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, and Cat Stevens abound, but Jules’s work is entirely his own: each song is an autonomous melodic entity, a new portrait of the singer as hopeful urban casualty.
Though the songs are uniformly stellar, it’s Jules’s voice that transforms Snakeoil from merely pretty to truly affecting. Rough-hewn and thin from years of emotional turmoil, Jules’s singing uncannily evokes Cat Stevens cavorting with Neil Young, with all the emotional immediacy of the former and all the storytelling power of the latter.
Snakeoil is an outstandingly consistent work. “Broke Window” opens the album with a ’60s flavored folk structure, shimmering harmonies, and a refrain both familiar and invigorating. A brushed snare and an auburn slide guitar adorn “No Poetry”, whose awkward opening lines, “There’s no poetry between us / Said the paper to the pen,” are justified by a melodically inventive chorus with a few great lines to offset the more ham-fisted poetry: “You were always such a pretty girl / And you told me I was beautiful.” Such simplicity fits Jules’s earnest delivery to a T.
Jules covers considerable ground with Snakeoil, devoting as much time to the trials of the heart as he does to his reluctant home base, Los Angeles, California. Jules toiled for years in the LA singer-songwriter scene before finally making his mark on the Donnie Darko soundtrack, and that sense of place mingled with begrudging acceptance permeates the album. “DTLA (Downtown Los Angeles)” is the most upbeat song on the album, chugging along lightly like the beat of the daily commute; the waltzy “Barstool” feels like a singalong in a seedy Sunset Strip juke joint, and its “Just stay in the bar / For as long as you can / ‘Cuz as long as you’re drinking / Then you’ve got the world in your hands” chorus has that same familiar feel — Jules’s worn baritone elevates such lyrics from clichéd to universal.
Of course, “Mad World” sticks out a bit as the yearning penultimate track among sparkling folk-rock lullabies, but in a good way; it sheds new light on Jules’s talent. “Mad World” highlights the extent of Jules’s interpretive capabilities — whereas many songs on Trading Snakeoil for Wolftickets sound as if you’ve heard them before (but, in fact, have not), “Mad World” is the only true cover. The greatest songs are timeless, transcending their own performance; not only does Gary Jules write such songs, but he sings them as no one else can. Masterful moments like the “la la la la la” refrain in “Patchwork G” could have been written by anyone, from post-electric Dylan to early Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Those transcendent moments come courtesy of Gary Jules, whose “Mad World” cover nearly overshadows his own best-kept secret: Jules’s best interpretations, in fact, are those of his own delicate, worldly compositions. A true find.