A Film Canon

 

 

A late masterpiece of American Romanticism, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary And Thyme recalls The Great Gatsby in its desire to re-imbue the continent with the wondrous gaze of the first settlers, transforming New York City into a semi-English, semi-pastoral landscape, in which lamp-posts grow flowers, streets are paved with cobblestones, and "cathedral bells" go "tripping down the alleyways". More pervasively, every urban phenomenon, however banal, or bleak, is transformed into the pretext for a refinement of sensory experience. Although the songs are frequently visual in nature, this is only for the purpose of stressing the limits of visuality, two of the strongest ("Patterns", "The Dangling Conversation") describing the sensory reorientation that comes with dimming light, and the onset of night. This involves a movement from the tactile (crinoline, cambric, organdy) to the olfactory (parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme), as if the duo's ambition were to shroud themselves in the nocturnal city, translate it directly into a perfume, or, ultimately, find some new language for its ineffable "hush", or "shadow", best approximated by their own harmonising. As with The Sounds Of Silence, this nocturnal journey culminates with the subway, but presents its anonymous messages in a poetic, rather than prophetic, register, perhaps explaining the relative lack of extroversion, or even enunciatory ambition, as most of the songs exhibit a fragmentary quality that ensures that the album works more as a single statement than any other in the duo's career. This self-sufficiency may, in turn, explain the curious lack of love songs, whose import tends to be deflected into a ceaseless, generalised wandering, epitomised by the haunting "For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her."