On the face of it hooking up with a jazz musician and composer doesn’t look likely to help recognition-wise, and it truth it probably won’t.
On the face of it hooking up with a jazz musician and composer doesn’t look likely to help recognition-wise, and it truth it probably won’t.
There’s an old saw in music that US artists try to sound British and the British ones try to sound American. In truth there are many who couldn’t come from anywhere else but where they do.
Having spent a fair amount of time of late listening to Eels it struck me that there are huge similarities at the heart of what Mark Everett and Aidan Moffat are doing and expressing. Of course there’s an ocean of difference between their confessional, dryly humorous introspection, but Moffat’s sometimes sleazy physicality deserves to be recognised in the same way. That it isn’t is probably down to the sleaze but also wilfully difficult (if pleasingly daring) musical choices too. Later Arab Strap songs were actually pretty uplifting and sumptuous, but setting your spoken word tales to snippets of long lost incidental music doesn’t make for a wide audience.
On the face of it hooking up with a jazz musician and composer doesn’t look likely to help recognition-wise, and it truth it probably won’t. Bill Wells though provides a variety of different musical moods to match Moffat’s still booze-soaked tales (or maybe Moffat provides the words to match the music). Sometimes cinematically uplifting, sometimes drivingly harsh, from the avant-garde to the more traditionally tuneful they are suffused with the same hubris, uncertainty, bluntness and irascibility as Moffat’s words.
Together they add up to an occasionally uncomfortable, but mostly warm and moving record whose universal themes should gladden the bruised heart in just the same way as their transatlantic counterparts.
The spurious comparisons and half-formed opinions in this piece were originally expressed on www.soundsxp.com