Dreams, horses, darkness and uplifting otherworldliness feature in this wonderful, mischievously mirror-titled ninth LP under the Smog artists’s own name, pouring out velvet voiced beauty, vivid lines, deadpan humour, acoustic intimacy and full band momentum. There is slightly less caustic wit that 2020’s quiet and drily delivered Gold Record, but this album loses none of that magic, and brings a wider variety of styles in fabulous songs that seem to inhabit a cognitively twilight world.
After the quietly gorgeous opener First Bird, we are hit with one of the album’s most striking lines. “I feel something coming on, a disease or a song,” he intones at the start of second track, Everyway, before opening up the stark, shock-effect image of the first person narrator’s account of shipwrecked sailors warming themselves on the corpse of a horse “blood on our hands up to our elbows”. A dream-like otherworldliness also comes on on Planets: “Well, I spent so long/Lying on this rock, staring at the sky/So long, I forgot how to talk” . But Coyote is perhaps the key standout, with the fabulous multiple reality image of: “Holding hands through many lives / In clusters / Or packs / Or coyote bands”. His own band indeed works wonders too, featuring a core of drummer Jim White of Dirty Three, guitarist Matt Kinsey, bassist Emmett Kelly and pianist Sarah Ann Phillips. From quiet acoustic, such as the intimate recollection of his children’s hands on Lily, other tracks build powerfully with brass, organ and more, sometimes toe-tapping, and upbeat such as Natural Information. At times there are echoes of his great 2000 Smog album Dongs of Sevotion and a feel of Lambchop’s Up with People and Is A Woman era. This is his 23rd album overall.
There are many musical surprises too. Partition has a krautrocky, relentless energy, Naked Souls morphs almost into into a frenzied jazz improv with trombones and organ or piano. The quieter closing track returns to more familiar alt-county territory. Last One At The Party trips easily along, but ambiguously portrays a departed figure subject to gentle, droll put-down, but also portrayed with a tinge of grief. Nothing is ever quite as it seems. A richly rewarding, blissful hour of music and lyrics exploring the sensual, adventurous elsewhere. Out on Drag City.
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