You can’t buy this album.
No, seriously, you can’t. At least not anymore. In its original incarnation, it was self-released, and though Elijah Wyman printed it twice, the run was still limited to fewer than 500 copies. Three years or so later, Grinding Tapes did a limited-edition re-release — and by limited, I mean that they pressed fifty copies, which you had to pre-order. (As a side note, I saw Elijah live a month or so before the re-release happened, and I gave him a hard time about the fact that I couldn’t buy Give & Take anymore. As such, I like to think I had something to do with its re-release. Look, just let a man have his dream, okay?) At the time, Wyman said this was it, he was done with this album, and he wasn’t going to put it out again. I don’t really doubt that he meant it either.
So, you may well ask, why are you bothering to review an album that’s several years old and out of print? The answer is: because I’ve been listening to it over and over again for the past couple weeks, and even if you can’t find it and share it with me, I still just want to talk about it.
Part of what I like best about Give & Take, I think, is that it has a sort of innocence about it, the sound of someone discovering songwriting for the first time. Occasionally, as on “Lines,” Wyman double-tracks his voice so that he can sing both parts, but otherwise this is the simplest of acoustic albums: a man and his guitar. Further, Wyman rarely falls into folk-style strumming, opting instead for repetitive picking and unusual but quiet riffs on two or three strings. This is a spare, delicate record. It’s clean — although, as Wyman wryly states on “Heartbreaker”: “even Florida looks clean on a postcard.”
Give & Take’s most immediate touchstone is probably something like Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, but while it reminds me of that album sonically, Wyman approaches this material from a very different perspective. The mood is worlds away from the southern Gothic horror of Why We Never Go Swimming & Other Short Stories (notwithstanding the fact that Wyman would choose to recycle “Girls Should Drive Automatics” for use on that album), and although it has some Christian inflections (especially on “Shadowlands,” which I guess is fitting for a song named after a C. S. Lewis biopic), religious themes don’t dominate the record quite as much as they do on the one immediately after it, Beautiful Like Words. Rather, there’s a sort of peace about a lot of the music, something that might almost be naivete — one of the album’s best songs is called “I Like Cotton Better When It Flies,” for crying out loud — if it weren’t for the fact that Wyman’s lyrics are too literate for that. In a good way, more like, say, Rachael Sage than mid-period Sting. It’s a trait that, to borrow Wyman’s words again, is “rare as rain in Los Angeles.”
Since this is so hard to find, I recommend you pick up one of Wyman’s albums that’s in print. Why We Never Go Swimming is the better of the two — it made Superstarcastic’s 88 Darlings of 2006, after all, so you know it’s good. But if by some miracle, you find this one, be sure you give it a spin for me. And then give it another one for yourself, ’cause you deserve it.
Release Date: July 26, 2003
Label: Grinding Tapes (eventually)
Rating: 9/10
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