ART SCHOP, The Fifth Hammer

Art Schop, the musical guise of singer/songwriter and philosophy and fiction writer Martin Walker, commands our attention not simply because he writes obtuse poetic lyrics like, creates a similar dark aesthetic to and talk/sings a lot like Leonard Cohen – but because with every turn of phrase, he inspires us to Google frantically to expand our knowledge of history,  philosophy and historical characters from other eras.

Oh, and because he launched his career with Wolfswork (2012), an album that conflated the Great Recession with the rise and fall of the Greek Empire and the founder of the Stoics, and has previous song titles like “My First Goose,” “No Maggot Lonely” and “Have you Paid the Gasbill” on his Death Waits II album.

On his latest compelling – no, more than that, truly astonishing in breadth, scope and cleverness – opus The Fifth Hammer, Schop gifts us with these trippy lines over a simple acoustic guitar line on “Me, My Lover, Part I”: “As I lay with my lover, I contemplated the span of her hypoteneuse/It was an irrational number, none other than the square root of two” on our way to the thematic core of the 10-track collection: “What do we do with the fifth hammer, we cast it away…”

Before we get to the artist’s inspiration, it’s worth throwing out another genius lyric from the lush, string enhanced “The Underachiever” that could serve as one of multiple possible entry points into this immersive – and if you allow it, life and soul changing – experience: “I don’t subscribe to the philosophy of Liebniz that this is the best of all worlds/No, if god allowed the Holocaust, malaria and famine/Surely I can have a glass or two of wine/The world is clearly flawed/I’m sure you would agree/So why try to be perfect all the time.” Sums up everything about this beautiful, screwed up existence of ours, doesn’t it?

Schop’s thematic springboard for The Fifth Hammer and enigmatic titles like “Oslo to Copenhangen,” “All Philosophy Worth the Name,” “Nietzsche’s Horse” – all of which can be appreciated for their richly philosophical poetic musings as well as their hypnotic melodies and his intimate vocals – is The Fifth Hammer: Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World Daniel Heller-Roazen, a prolific author and the Arthur W. Marks ’19 Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton.

Drawing on the story of an ancient fabled gesture of Pythagoras, Roazen illuminates the key for understanding ideas of harmony in the broadest sense of the term. Transforming the author’s eight chapters, linked together in the book like tones of a single scale, into richly grounded, highly personal and craftily rendered songs, he turns the grand philosophical missteps of revered historical figures like Pythagoras, Kepler, Liebniz and Kant into sheer, lyrically provocative musical grace. It’s all pretty heavy stuff best suited to the appreciation of enthusiasts of such topics, but rendered in a way that could cross over to openminded folk rock fans.