DANNY AND THE CHAMPIONS OF THE WORLD
You Are Not A Stranger Here (Loose)
THE SNIPPET OF A WEATHER REPORT broadcast, sliding in at the beginning of this album, promises dry and fine with a cool breeze. It’s not too far off the truth, but like most weather reports it’s a beginning, not the final word. There are clouds and disturbed surfaces ahead too. Life’s a bit more complex than they promise you.
In his various incarnations – solo, in the trio Bennet Wilson Poole, in groups like Grand Drive and, on and off with various combinations, Danny & The Champions Of The World – Danny George Wilson principally has played in two overlapping pools.
On one side lies the soul-punched, pop-laced, heart-stopping, brothers-in-arms rock’n’roll that has its spiritual home on the Jersey shore; on the other is the soul-soaked, roots-braced, roll-up-your-sleeves country rock drawing from America’s south and west (as filtered through its denim-clad city girls and boys). And for Wilson there’s no contradiction or conflict here. One feeds the other, one in a sense naturally leads to the other.
His voice of roughened sides, always-reaching-out top, and softened emotions beneath it all, is at ease in either. His lyrical leaning to intensity, openness and dogged, if sorely tested, faith in his fellow humans, is a fit wherever he chooses to swim. And both styles have even more resonance for the fact that the Englishman grew up and lives many miles from either genre’s “home”, but has this stuff bone-deep in him, like any convert whose commitment goes harder and stays stronger than those born to the faith.
So the first Champs record in eight years could reasonably be expected to dive back into these familiar waters, and no one would can be complaining. Indeed you might hear Sooner Or Later, with its chugging-forward rhythm, counterintuitive mood-lifting chorus and Clarence Clemons-ish sax, and think you know the territory. But take a second look at that song and then the album and you start to see the signs that this is veering out of the middle lane. The result is as much elevation as revelation.
The basic elements are still there, but You Are Not A Stranger Here finds Wilson and band stretching out: sonically (intermittent found sounds, like distant radios tuned in and out; light touches of electronic textures; vocals pulled back a little from the foreground), instrumentally (synthesisers alongside saxophone; arena guitar next to pedal steel; programmed drums together with human hands; a lot of air), and stylistically (limpid rock for longhairs and diaphanous ballads demanding submersion within; lightly smoked backroom bar stuff).
Even the lyrics, which have been Wilson’s weakest discipline previously, push a bit further past the expected: self-questioning, tinged with fatigue, aware of missed connections, hiding little – confirming the album’s overall feel of something wiser that doesn’t need to shout to convince you. So much so that even though ambient rock-as-folktronica The Poetics Of Space (think Mark Knopfler crossing paths with Tunng) – is an instrumental, it leaves you in no doubt of its meaning.
The languid sunset of I’m In Love, with Paul Lush’s guitar ripples spreading out over the simple loop and voices-off flirting with both the classical and the practical, might have been the prelude to a burst of chorus explosion elsewhere but here doesn’t seek to escape, instead settling comfortably in its mood. The similarly arranged Talking A Good Game feels like it may do the same, but this time there are small gradations, insignificant individually but when combined tipping the song upwards.
Interludes In Search Of Koji and Every Door You Have Ever Opened muddy the waters just enough with odd sounds and incomplete ideas to be something like minute-long palette cleansers, while Kicking Tyres is nearly 9 minutes of being absorbed into a dreamlike state that isn’t as obvious as psychedelic, but is definitely “altered” enough to blur your progress.
You probably can tell by this that reference points now move from Jersey to Philadelphia, taking in the classic rock bends of The War On Drugs, and from the South to Canada, incorporating some of the reshaped Neil Youngisms of Cowboy Junkies, while always conscious of the pastoral beats crews who beavered away on London’s fringe earlier this century. Not what was predicted then.
Don't be fooled by the cover, here lie more pools, and there's still swimming. It works.
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