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Hemlock Smith Participants: Michael Frei [songs – vocals – piano on The North Sea]
HEMLOCK SMITH
Hemlock Smith (Michael Frei) last stirred my calm airs through his wayward collaboration with Les Poissons Autistes in the peculiar and lustfully turned-away Three Times Dead, reviewed elsewhere at Sonoloco. Here he is again in a grander setting, collaboration-wise, as you can see from the set list above. The result does not stray far across the stage, though, beyond the spotlights, for there is a very comfortable – buts also mystical – intimacy all through these songs, tickling down your loins, exiting the tip of your nose in crackling electric discharges, leaving the darkness around your conscience glowing in violet. You can’t help but suspect, however, that this comfy sensation – like, let’s face it; all comfy positions – can be expected to hover capriciously inside a much grander, darker space, extending outwards in all directions, indefinitely around your suspended circumstance! I feel this set of Michael Frei tunes like a sphere of light, in mid air, ascended above the boards of the theater; the principal character looking through some papers, his nose close to the print, just parts of his countenance revealed by the sharp light; his searching gaze, blinking eyelid... and these songs his thoughts curling up like smoke out of this spinning compact disc. Hemlock Smith’s songs have become tantamount to a slightly twisted reality, to amuse and entertain, but just as much to scare and tempt, mystify and fulfill, on several plains of consciousness, much the way of dreams. Sweetness and acridity; the bitter with the sweet. This collection of songs under the title Keep The Devil Out Of Hillsboro brings the music alive in a part of my youth where the Beatles were new and fresh in those black, shiny wet November smalltown streets of age 16, but with a pull and drag towards the even dreamier hypnosis of Al Stewart, in a gentleman’s well-behaved pain, all circumstances well-dressed, the pain everybody awares and respected. Like Neil Young in Greendale, The Who in Tommy or even Woody Guthrie in Dust Bowl Ballads, Michael Frei brings on a kind of concept album, the songs entangled and tangling, dangling; in a “dangling conversation”… The mindstream is somewhat turned-away, the zero-point field exercising a relaxed power over poetry, through the introvert peace of old apple orchards; the elegance of the benevolence of early Donovan mystique in winter-closed English seaside resorts… The songs carry smashing arrangements, elegant and alluring. The morpheme-bearing voice sometimes smells like the air across the water outside the steelworks on the Baltic Coast. In an arty dream I see the dark hulls of giant hovercrafts disappearing like Flying Dutchmen into the songs, and alien-size Zeppelins pull through the thick paint of late Impressionism. The apparent simplicity has secret inlets to much grander scopes of things, fragrant canyons travelled by the open-minded and stubborn. Michael Frei gives some clues to the nature of these songs. He says, for example, that “this is a record about mistakes and happy incidents”… He goes on to explain that “the mistakes are mine and are discussed at length in the lyrics”… Hillsboro is a denominator for Frei, it seems. At least he has picked up the Hillsboro thread from track 9 of the earlier CD Three Times Dead; “Le corps subtils (Corony Coroner)”, in which the Hillsboro Public Library has a main role.
MICHAEL FREI
I’ll touch upon a few of the songs on the present CD: Track 1. Keep The Devil Out Of Hillsboro (4:10) My idea of the main character inside that hovering white light, inside his own moment, inside his feverish thoughts, is strengthened in this first song, in which the singer begins his song in a careful, close, hushed whisper right to your ear, right to his microphone. The melody catches on quickly, as it kind of rocks you like the sea, as it sort of pulls you to it’s breast, serves you coffee, talks to you in a clean, fresh breath: “I need to exorcise my state of mind”… Track 2. Blink (3:17) Another sarcastic piece of self-irony from the mouth of the middle-aged man who begins to feel the loss of vitality; a bitterness presented in a humty-dumpty hoquetus rhythm limping along a massive line-up of similar days, clouded by boredom and self-inflicted loss of fantasy. The feebleness and debility of the man’s statements are in stark contrast to the punching strength of the melody and the swinging jabs of the vocals. When the choir further strengthens the progression with their “hey, hey, heyhey, hey, hey”, you’re watching some kind of march staggering way into the far distance of a cartoon movie. Fascinating! Track 3. My Wonderful Bereaved (3:48) This is a quite wonderful, sad, even bitterly hopeless ballad with a welling force of longing and loss; “Elsalill stared into the sea, for want to drown or for want to breathe” […] oh why do hearts just stop but wounds still bleed… […] Elsalill looked into herself, and found nothing there she’d like to tell…” Since I’ve found strands of emotions and mental environments, as well as musical styles, which have me associate to the 1960s and the British pop culture, in Michael Frei’s writing, I can’t but let on that My Wonderful Bereaved makes me think of Peter Sarstedt’s Where Do You Go To My Lovely from 1969, even if the likeness is kind of remote. However, the softness and the melancholy somehow is out of place in our time, but fits right into an aura of Sarstedt’s 1969 single hit and songs like Rolling Stones’ As Tears Go By (1965) and their Lady Jane (1966) as well as Ruby Tuesday (1967). Hemlock Smith has a knack for producing extremely catchy tunes with the added pleasure of double-layered, mystical and not so easy penetrated stories, which makes the attentive listener hook up even tighter to the atmosphere that engulfs. Track 4. Queen Of The Spring Ball (4:31) Here is yet another story about a disappointed, flared-out existence who had hoped for quite much more, in the vein of the hard experience of the principal character of Marianne Faithful’s The Ballad of Lucy Jordan on her 1979 album Broken English. In these Michael Frei songs, a number of characters out of my youth in the 1960s and on come to life out of very distant parts of my consciousness, out of small-town discothèques and countryside boarding schools, and “some are dead and some are living”… Hemlock Smith unlocks many feelings and also loosens the ties that keep all those pictures of another age of mine down in obscurity. This is a quite unexpected effect of listening to Keep The Devil Out Of Hillsboro, and maybe just mine – but then again, I ‘m the one listening here… Queen Of The Spring Ball marches on in a reggae thumpy bumpy tour de force, Frei upholding his peculiar way of mixing sad and hopeless textual situations with powerful musical expressions, like writing tender, melancholy poems in fat, striking ink on white paper. I really enjoy the newness of this perception. The piece begins with the sole Julien Feltin banjo, which soon is joined by the strength of the Maxime Zampieri drums and a fat, thumping bass, after a while embraced by the brass section; all of these adding up in masterly escalations of tightness and forcefulness.
TO BE CONTINUED
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