ShareSUPERMODIFIED - Dave Graney and the Lurid Yellow Mist (Cockaigne/Fuse)
Another message from the parallel universe occupied by Dave Graney. This time it's about bringing the past into the present, and it's coming in loud and clear, from out on the astroplane.
If you think re-visiting two of your old albums from a decade ago to soup up the songs is a curious career move, you won't be alone. Critics trying to read the Graney match plan must have given up years ago; the guy's no longer in the main(stream) game but still cares enough to have a kick. His umpires are wearing different uniforms and he makes up his own rules.
The short story is that "Supermodified" takes significant parts of "The Brother That Lived" (2003) and "Heroic Blues" (2001), gives them a studio re-working and adds some outtakes. It works in its own right. It's a strong album - a double LP in the old money - that's more to the centre than "Knock Yourself Out" or "We Wuz Curious", but still retains that trademark eclectic edge.
There's a fresh vibe to the re-workings almost always but a dark undertone. Dave's songs are quirky vignettes with a narrative that's not always starkly clear on first listen, so the songs can make you work. Ambiguity be thy name. Re-cast rhythms, splashes of guitar or a re-tracked vocal go together her to build new versions of songs like "Clingin' To The Coast","A Boy Named Epic", "Are We Goin' Too Fast For Love?" and "I'm Seein' Demons".
At the risk of being repetitive, stating the obvious and being slagged for running it up the flagpole to see who salutes, it ain't always rock as you and I know it. It's leather sofa (as opposed to lounge) pop with muscles, deep R & B undercurrents and a quasi-European character. It's a soundtrack to an art-house thriller that's playing in a country cinema at the end of a dusty road, many miles from Graney's punk beginnings with The Moodists.
Make no mistake: Graney still loves to fuck shit up. He just doesn't break as many mic stands in the process. He posseses irony in wheelbarrow-loads but it's not the sole rationale for what he does. He plays for keeps.
I could reel off descriptions of all 18 tracks but it wouldn't serve much purpose. You'll be into it if you like his stuff. Others will have given up on this review in disgust because it's become patently that "Supermodified" doesn't barrel down the highway at 140kph, cop licks from the MC5 or get all greasy from rolling around on the garage floor. That's the choice you and your tastes make and that's well and good. Just remember that sometimes the backroads are more interesting. - The Barman
1/4
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KNOCK YOURSELF OUT - Dave Graney (Cockaigne/Fuse)
In which our hero puts himself even further out on a (non) commercial limb and produces one of the dirtiest and darkest-sounding albums of his 20-year career.
So what is it? Perverse R & B, on an early listen, but that descriptor evolves into something else eventually. How about Square-ploitaiton? This is the music Shaft would have played on his eight-track as he rounded Dead Man's Curve in his sports car on Sunset Boulevard at midnight with a bellyful of absinthe and a mindful of bad ideas. Black and smooth but somehow jarring.
It's not rock - at least not as 99 percent of the world knows it. It's anti-rock with creeping anarchism and a free set of steak knives thrown into the deal. Sequenced beats mix it with Clare Moore's ever-magnficient drums and neither seem to get their nose out of joint.
"Knock Yourself Out" is the sound of someone kicking out jams by stealth on all but the more obvious/conventional "Body Snatcher Blues". This 'un borrows a rhythm bed borrowed from Bowie and Iggy's "The Idiot", creeping along on a carpet of fuzz and a treated Graney vocal. Come to think of it, "2068 Babe" also takes the trip to Hansa Studio.
Likers of lyrics will find much reason to become better acquainted with the carnal "Throwin' One Into the World", the icon-decrying "Dylan the Indie Fake" and the twisted travelogue "I Don't Wanna Go Bush". The title track is a cut-up of key Graney lyrics and doesn't suffer a bit from being totally self-referrential.
It all sounds great too, with a mix of deep bass, percussion, buried guitars, keys and Dave's distinctive sing-speak vocal. Shimmering wah-wah ("Honky Tonk Rope a Dope") glints through occasionally, with the ensemble playing of the Lurid Yellow Mist (sans keyboardist Mark Fitzgibbon whose role is covered by Dave or Clare) ever present but wearing all sorts of sonic adornment.
You can see the Major Label A & R guys shaking their heads (if they bothered to play this) and asking: "What the fuck?" before returning to their sales targets and spreadhseets. It's tempting to say "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke" but this is deadly serious. The sad fact is that those men don't know but the little girls, and lovers of the unusual, understand.
So you know you don't have to search out your kicks in all the usual places. Take the trip. - The Barman
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WE WUZ CURIOUS - The Lurid Yellow Mist Featuring Dave Graney and Clare Moore (Illustrious Artists/Fuse)
Chances at this stage of the game are that you'll either be curious or have your switch flipped permanently to "Off". If it's the latter it's a pity because Graney, Moore and Co continue to come up with interesting ways to work outside the straight-up rock idiom, doing it very much on their own terms.
So there. I said it. It's not Rock. Well maybe just a bit. Mostly it's a mix of lounge pop, psych-funk, jazz and outright weirdness, all blended in a cocktail shaker of lyrical intrigue. In fact, Dave Graney's words are so ironic that he risks giving Socrates a run for his philosophical money.
Whether it's in the stinging "Punk Dies" ("Real punks go down fast...real punks life on cough medicine") or the reflective "I Needed Someone To Find Me" where he muses he could have "paid more attention to my major mask", it's an autobiographical outing for Dave Graney. The Lurid Mist, his band of four years, is up to the task and in perfect sympathy. They're all seasoned players bringing a tremendous amount of skill and musical input to the party but for me, it's the bass-playing of Surrealist Stu Thomas and drumming of Clare Moore that deserves the spotlight. Unobtrusive but masters of their groove, they lay an impeccable bedrock.
If the "major mask" was the persona that fronted The Coral Snakes, the long-serving Graney band that produced an Australian mega-charting album like "You Wanna Be There But You Don't Wanna Travel", who's doing the talking these days? There's probably scope for a thesis or two there. Who calls a song with a title like "Let's Kill God Again" a "crowd pleasing radio single"? And releases it just in time for Australia being invaded by 200,000 Catholic "pilgrims" for World Youth Day? I'm anticipating the traffic chaos that's about to grip Sydney and praying it was deliberate.
"I'm In The Future Now" and "Let's Kill God Again" almost present the band as the Choral (sic) Snakes with big choruses and lush feels. Production was undertaken at Melbourne's Sing Sing Studios so you know it sounds great.
"Bring My Liar" couples a gentle Moore-Graney harmony refrain to a big bassline and jazzy guitar and keys, while Sir David spins a self-referential lyrical web over seven--plus minutes
"We Wuz Curious" goes all sorts of places. "Junk Time" sounds like Soft Cell electro-pop and stands apart from the wah-wah funk of "I Like To Be Haunted". While there's not much of the driving rock of Graney at his commercial peak, there's no reason the bulk of his audience from those days shouldn't pick up on this. The intellect and humour that was always inherent is shining even brighter. Europe might be the place to take this (The Lurid Yellow Mist are fresh from a jaunt through those parts supporting Nick Cave) in the immediate future. - The Barman
KEEPIN' IT UNREAL - Dave Graney & Clare Moore featuring Stu D...aka Comte d'Alucard
(Reverberation)
Rock and roll might have been where Dave Graney used to hide but he blew his cover years ago. After tasting mainstream beer barn and festival success in the mid-'90s, the chameleon of Australian rock 'n' pop cast off his leather coat of many colours and his musical muse headed for musical byways less travelled, where it was harder to put pigeons into holes but they could subsist on their own terms. "Keepin' It Unreal" is just one more excursion on that strange trip.
The latest finds Graney and musical muse Clare Moore farming their grooves in stripped back mode. This time it's Sir David on acoustic and 12-string guitars with his partner eschewing drums for vibraphone, for the most part. Filling out the line-up, which spent the time in residency at a club in Melbourne and then on low budget road trips around the country, is boss bassman Stuart Thomas, on six-string bass.
The 14 songs are a mix of familiar and some lesser-heard Graney compositions or co-writes with Moore and others, plus the odd cover (sometimes "odd" is the operative word). The whole album was cut in a day at Dave and Clare's Pondersosa home studio, so you know it sounds great.
OK rock pigs, let's cut to the chase: No-one ever claimed vibraphone to be a rock and roll staple. There's not one screaming guitar solo to be heard. Graney may own a fuzzbox but he's not going to use it. This is lounge-blues, richly anchored in warm acoustic sounds but topped with Dave's unique vocal stylisations. So if you pick up this CD, give it a spin and find yourself lost for descriptors, don't do a Favio and say "I can't believe it's not rock". There's more goodness in his disc than some mass-produced slab of laboratory margarine.
Who woulda thunk New York noise-and-menace merchants Suicide would have their "Diamonds Fur Coat Champagne" re-birthed as a driving acoustic piece that's still edgy in its own oblique way? Or that Clare would vocally tackle "Parchman Farm" (credited to Mose Allison but I know the version by John Mayall's Clapton-populated Bluesbreakers best) and infuse it with warm understatement?
Of the re-worked Graney originals there's none better here than "There Was a Time", which is stripped of its Mack truck engine room to propelled along by something more lithe and exotic. "Biker in Business Class" and "Lt. Colonel, Cavalry" also sound radically different to their alter egos.
The one departure from what passes as the norm is the closer (which is to say it has drums). A self-confessed Francophile, Graney gives an English language spin to French artist M's "Who of Us Two?". No idea how the original goes but in his and Clare's hands it's a jaunty slice of unmistakably Gallic pop (and, unsurprisingly as it sounds out of place, was recorded in a separate session.)
I was talking to a Melbourne muso about the musical place where Graney and Moore live and we were both stumped for an adequate name for it. It's not defined by conventional record company strictures but in its own way it's a more subversive existence as they've led in the past. Old fans will still make a connection.
Anyway, if you approach this album don't do it with trepidation. It mightn't get you to spend the rest of your life on the lounge but it does us all good to get out of the garage, occasionally.
- The Barman
HASHISH
& LIQUOR – Dave Graney & Clare Moore (Cockaigne/Reverberation)
Wasn’t it alleged cock flasher Jimbo Morrison who dropped the line
“I’ll always be a wordman/Better than a birdman” on the
out-of-it (and very posthumous) “American Prayer” spoken word
album? Rhetorical
question, but it fits right into a review of a double CD set from Australia’s
Royal Family of Pop, Dave Graney and Clare Moore. After all, they’re
the folks responsible for the best (only?) ode to the Australian Doors Show
tribute that you’re ever likely to hear.
Speaking of wordmen, we’re often justifiably accused of being Birdman
acolytes at the I-94 Bar, but even a staunch rock and roll soldier needs diversionary
listening material after a long stint in the trenches supporting the War Against
The Jive. Which makes “Hashish & Liquor” such an enjoyable
and off-beat pleasure.
Hopefully it’s not too much of an over-simplification to paint Dave
Graney as the “wordman” of his partnership with drummer/wife/muse
Clare Moore, but it’s the lyrical musings on “Hashish” -
about the nature of stardom, being stoned (in the many senses of the term)
and all parts in-between - that get me every time. It’s not so much
a ‘drug concept’ album as a ‘life concept’ piece,
breezy enough for the casual listener but rewarding if you’re up for
a challenge, too. So put that in your hash pipe and smoke it.
The music ranges from deft, jazz-tinged rock interspersed to diversions into
folky and neo-country byways. It feels all warm, like it was produced your
lounge room – which it probably would have been, in part, if you lived
with Dave and Clare at their Ponderosa. The usual range of recent suspects
that makes up The Lurid Yellow Mist play various instruments, supplemented
by Melbourne jazz pianist Mark Fitzibbon, who’s now also part of the
live show.
There’s a consistency in the run of recent Graney albums that makes
you glad, in a way, that he no longer carries around a major label AustraliaCard
in his knapsack. He’s free to do whatever he likes - and you’re
also free to listen. It ain’t Detroit rock but it’s fascinating.
As the man says, his schtick weighs a ton.
There’s a neat commentary that explores the rationale for dividing this
package into explorations of infinity (Dave) and the abyss (Clare), but you’ll
have to buy the CDs and pore over the liner notes to be up to speed. What
you can expect when you spin the second album, Clare’s “Liquor”,
is the unexpected.
“Liquor” is a dazzling trip into various musical dimensions, where
the drinks are served straight up and the language is glam, sequenced beats,
psychedelic sounds, strings and woodwind. It is also seriously out there and,
at times (“The Town Bike Song”), fairly rocking. Tales of lust,
boredom, love and cane-wielding nuns.
One of the most interesting and arresting packages to defy classification
in 2005. - The Barman
3/4
THE
BROTHER WHO LIVED - The Royal Dave Graney Show (Cockaigne)
The critics who've dubbed this "lounge pop" aren't listening hard enough.
There's a chance they never made it past the opening "I'm Seeing Demons",
where an edgy vocal should have given the game away. Not lounge, more like
doing laps around the sunken island bar of a very whacked-out nightclub where
rock dinosaurs once ruled the world.
The latin rhythms
and acoustic guitar that underpin most of these tracks mask a dark heart and
a hovering rock influence. These are the usual Graney musings and observations
- Rock Star as the Great People Watcher. While it would be tempting to attribute
this to recent forays with the Moodists - the old band for Dave (or David,
as is his current preferred moniker) Graney and drummer Clare Moore - it would
also probably be wrong. It doesn't pay to try and second guess royalty.
"Heavy entertainment" reads the subtext on the CD slick, and in some ways
this album IS at least a mirror image of 1995's "The Soft 'n' Sexy Sound",
whose lush textures were more Bacharach than Birthday Party. They're not altogether
missing, but on cuts like the title track and "There's the Royal Troll" the
guitars of Bill Miller and Stuart Perera give proceedings a rocky edge, against
the always nimble rhythms of Clare Moore and bassist Adele Pickvance.
Variety remains a watchword: "All Our Friends Were Stars", for example, takes
things back to the loungeroom, but "Like a Millionaire" is a jaunty walking
blues and "I Am Your Humble Servant" an exercise in folk narrative. The various
incarnations of Dave - sorry David - Graney pre-date the lounge music fad
by several years and many shades of powder blue safari suit, so let's dump
the labels (except those inside the collars of shirts that say "Polyester-rayon:
Do not iron") and listen up.
There's no pretending that this fare is going to satisfy every I-94 Barfly
but those who know the Graney muse will be well pleased. We'll be giving it
more than the odd late evening spin. - The
Barman
3/4
HEROIC
BLUES - The Dave Graney Show (Cockaigne)
Barfly Simon Li will have a fit but I have to admit to being a bit of
a Dave Graney fan back in his Coral Snakes days, catching his brand of wry,
self-deprecating grooves on more than a few occasions. With their intuitive
and sometimes delicate playing, the Coral Snakes took rock 'n' roll to some
strange places. For every rocker like "I'm Gonna Release Your Soul"
there was an unclassifiably compelling foil like "Night of the Wolverine".
And was there a sharper dresser with more Tai Chi moves than the gold-plated
enigma at centre stage? And then, in spite of success - or maybe just to spite
it - they went all soft and sexy and we parted ways.
What a surprise, then, to hear from the man himself recently with his own
admission that he was a visitor to the I-94 Bar. (Maybe not that much of a
shock seeing he's a contemporary of many of the people we've interviewed and,
with other half and long-time musical collaborator Claire Moore, a former
member of the Moodists back in the punk days.) Anyway, David Graney (like
Farnsie he's also adopted grown-up nomenclature) now fronts The Dave Graney
Show (who I suppose should become known as the David Graney Show from here
on in). "Heroic Blues" is their third long player.
Exactly what sort of music it is remains open to conjecture. As Graney points
out, he now occupies his own musical space, for better or worse. The strings
are all but gone but the close-miked vocals, laidback feel and warm textures
remain, due in no small part to the wonderfully deft guitar playing of Bill
(The Ferrets) Miller and Stuart Perera. The wit's intact too, on tracks like
the obscenely funny ode to inner-citydom "Clinging to the Coast"
('Who knows what horrors lie in the west?') and "Leaving the Mount".
And who else but the former King of Pop would have thought of writing a song
from the perspective of the fatherless offspring of Rod Stewart ("Son
of Maggie Mae")? The familiar theme of "star removed from/in spite
of reality" from "Rock and Roll Is Where I Hide" and "Morrison
Floor Show" is back, this time on the title track where the singer does
his damnedest to convince himself he's where it's at.
"Folk-soul" is the typically idiosyncratic tag Dave, sorry David,
has given it. Undeniably organic, there's scarcely a track that rocks in the
conventional sense here but it's not the elevator crooning of "The Devil
Drives" either. Too coy to be grown-up, too "out there" to
take the conventional road, "Heroic Blues" will find a place on
the CD rotel late at night, when the smoke's cleared from the war against
the jive and it's time for (quieter) reflection. No cocktails, thanks. Make
mine an absinthe.
OK punks...we
will review the new Moodists compilation when we get hold of it. We now resume
normal transmission.
- The Barman
1/2
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