RICHARD SWIFT
The Novelist / Walking Without Effort
Secretly Canadian
· Modernist time warp.
Peering out from the monochromatic covers of these, his debuts, Richard Swift harkens back to an earlier age of songcraft and image.
At just over 40 minutes, split between two CDs, The Novelist and Walking Without Effort serve as literal halves of the same whole. Forcing listeners to change discs midway through, Swift overcomes the oft-lamented complaint of vinyl lovers that there’s no mid-point flip of the record, no intentional break. While his vaudevillian tendencies on The Novelist are closer in spirit to The Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt than to Rufus Wainwright (with whom he’s received only somewhat apt comparisons), Walking Without Effort veers towards ’70s FM California pop — he even looks a bit like Jim Croce on the cover and gains extra points for avoiding all traces of The Eagles’s brand of pony-tail and belt-buckle shit. Approaching the orchestral grace of Jon Brion (sounding at times like a far more dewy-eyed Eels), Swift pops out of nowhere like a rediscovered gem.
Sure, he may at first appear like a bundle of reference points, but Swift’s The Novelist and Walking Without Effort are the type of introduction records most often referred to as auspicious – not to mention genuinely, intriguingly good.
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