Chesnutt’s Canadian conspirators

Vic CHESNUTT has some words of advice for young lovers in his song “You Are Never Alone.” “It’s OK, you can take a condom. It’s OK, you can take a Valtrex,” he sings on his forthcoming album “North Star Deserter.” “It’s OK, you can get an abortion and keep on keeping on.”

Chesnutt has a long history of morosely hilarious observations about love, sex and death. Yet “Deserter,” which features Chesnutt backed by members of avant-garde orchestral collectives Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band and Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto, is the boldest thing he’s put to tape yet.

Chesnutt’s past collaborators include Van Dyke Parks, jazz legend Bill Frisell, jammy rockers Widespread Panic and longtime fan Michael Stipe of R.E.M. But the sprawling, noisy soundscapes of his new label mates on Montreal’s Constellation Records seem an even more unlikely fit for his biting, immediate folk musings.

“Personally, I had a lot in common with them, even though I’m a good Southern boy and they’re urbane Canadians,” Chesnutt said. “I was nervous at first though. I was worried they might hate me.”

Chesnutt’s friend Jem Cohen, the filmmaker, saw the bands’ shared bleakness about capitalism and modern love and pitched the idea of doing a record together at the noted Montreal studio Hotel2Tango. “Deserter’s” raw, ambient arrangements match Chesnutt’s weary inflections better than those on any of his albums to date. The strings of “Glossolalia” creak like a sinking ship, and the staticky minimalism of “Marathon” evokes Elliott Smith playing in an abandoned subway tunnel.

Yet for all the musical gloom and Chesnutt’s cutting lyrical cynicism, the group bonded over some unlikely topics.

As it turns out, Constellation artists don’t survive solely on a diet of socialist tracts and Cabernet from art gallery openings.

“One thing we talked a lot about was food,” Chesnutt said. “My Protestant, Southern-fried cuisine is very different from their citified Jewish fare. But they were such warm and funny people, I didn’t want it to end.”

---

Deerhoof and ‘Dedication’

In the film “Dedication,” Billy Crudup’s acid-tongued writer is a bit, shall we say, standoffish. Likewise, the spastic, jerky art-punk of Deerhoof is bound to infuriate as often as it fascinates. And the experience of listening to the latter while watching the former torment Mandy Moore on screen seems almost perversely surreal.

Deerhoof provided much of “Dedication’s” unlikely soundtrack (out Sept. 11), and even the band’s guitarist, John Dieterich, didn’t know quite what to expect when director and longtime friend Justin Theroux tapped the group for further contributions to the score.

“It was an extended version of the way we usually work on music, where we sort of flounder around,” Dieterich said. “But that was part of Justin’s vision -- that interplay between emotions and violence is one thing I liked about the movie.”

Deerhoof’s skittish rhythms, distortion blasts and aggressively innocent melodies hit the physical experience of falling in love pretty accurately. Theroux, once a roadie for Fugazi and a familiar face to David Lynch and “Sex and the City” fans, originally planned to use a number of Deerhoof songs in “Dedication’s” soundtrack. But he brought on the band to perform new instrumental scores once the parallels between the band and his characters became obvious.

Crudup’s obsessive-compulsive, perpetually jittery character would no doubt appreciate Deerhoof’s refusal to sit still and play pop tunes. Dieterich likewise knows how writer’s block, especially when scoring a buzzed-about film, can make you pretty crazy as well.

“We have this failure to write songs,” Dieterich said. “But Justin knew exactly what he wanted. If he wasn’t around, I knew we would have turned in some polished thing, and he would have known in one second that it wasn’t working.”

--

Van Zandt hits the books

If you’ve ever complained that “The Sopranos’ ” Silvio Dante didn’t have enough of an influence over your child’s education, fear not. Actor- musician-itinerant E Street Band member Steven Van Zandt -- through his Rock and Roll Forever Foundation and the National Assn. for Music Education -- is crafting a curriculum and multimedia kit designed for American middle and high schools that explores rock’s influence on culture.

Free course packs, set to be distributed to schools in 2008, will draw heavily from essays on rock’s role in history from scholars and critics, so don’t expect Jack Black teaching tweens how to finger-tap guitar solos.

august.brown@latimes.com