Chet – Chelsea Silver, Please Come Home
This is a bizarre album. It’s basically an indie record, but it has elements of the wild, desperate camp of Wild Beasts’ Limbo Panto, but with a lot less yearning and a lot more direct weirdness. There are howls of anguish which read as genuinely painful, and yet they are set within a context which is often so surreal and charicatured that it feels as peculiar as it does affecting.
It’s one of those albums where I found myself listening, thinking ‘what the fuck is he on about here?’ quite a bit, but still found myself oddly fascinated. Perhaps the strangest part is the way it shifts gear in mid song, not so much for that shift, which is fairly common, but for what it shifts from and to. Because this record can actually sound like a lovely acoustic indie album for large parts, and although there are hints of what it really is, which bubble away under the surface, they really are only hints for the most part.
So, most of the time Chelsea Silver, Please Come Home potters along at half-pace, with acoustic guitar and straightforward indie vocals – Saint Jerome, My Baby Tames Lions being in the most familiar format, with Cautious Melody similar, albeit with slightly more orchestral shades around the edges of the melody. Consequently, when the guitars get the big and vocals build from a croon to a wail it really does feel like something otherworldly has gripped the song by the neck and is tightening its grip to the point where the singer becomes wild-eyed and panicky and the emotional level of the song starts to wobble and leap skittishly, grasping for succour from pretty much anywhere it might be found.
So, unusually, it’s not the tunes per se which I like about this, as much as the emotional uncertainty. It’s hard to actually know what you’re faced with, where the song is going, and there’s always the chance it might just go mental on you, which brings a different kind of anticipation to listening to the album. It’s like being in the pub with a friend who is prone to occasional wild mood swings, getting more and more drunk and foggy, and all the while in the back of your mind you don’t know if he’s going to burst into tears and tell you his woes, or if his eyes might glaze over and he might start picking fights for no reason, and just maybe with you.
Chet – An Abiding Love, Despite Adversarial Vice
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