Boomkat Product Review: Since his breakthrough album Dressed Up For The Letdown, Richard Swift has managed to earn himself a place among the great and the good of contemporary Americana, having toured with Wilco and found himself recording much of this album in their loft. Swift achieves a remarkable equilibrium between trad songwriting values and innovative (yet comparably old-fashioned) production experiments. The jaunty honky-tonk of 'The Original Thought' is greatly bolstered by the presence of a seemingly out of place chubby synthesizer line that lumbers into the song from out of nowhere, and similarly, there's a space-echo dub undercurrent to the AOR slowjam 'Bat Coma Motown', bringing all kinds of vintage depth to the piece. His side-project under the name Instruments Of Science And Technology revealed a fascination with antique electronics, and vintage studio experiments, and this is carried through into his current song-based exploits.
Alongside 2007's Dressed Up for the Letdown and 2018's posthumous The Hex, Richard Swift's The Atlantic Ocean (2009) completes his triumvirate of meta-pop masterpieces.It's easy to work out just why he's so highly regarded among his peers: Swift's not only a songwriter in the classic '70s mold, he's also got a real ear for detail when it comes to arrangement.
As the timeless Sly Stone-leaning burner "Lady Luck" stretches to it's climax, you get the sense that Swift has put his faith and trust into the familial love around him and not in the dangling carrot of music. Across the entire album, Swift is burning bridges and the exposing trolls underneath. The chorus of "Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, You're gonna drown, drown drown," is itself a wee stab at a major label of a similar name.
I got the right LPs," Swift begins the album on the title track over fuzzed Casio stabs and a clunky, bounding drum machine. It's a cheeky - if not wholly acrimonious - takedown of music industry artifice and hipster culture vapidity. Meticulously arranged and gorgeously recorded (including a session at Chicago's famed Wilco Loft), Atlantic Ocean is an immaculate kiss off.
0 kommentar(er)
