DANIELSON
Ships
Secretly Canadian/Sounds Familyre
· Singing in tongues – Bros. Danielson returns with the best album of his career.
Even on paper, Danielson is an obvious acquired taste. Awkward, bizarre and staunchly Christian, Daniel Smith and his staff of players (at times numbering over 25, featuring the likes of Sufjan Stevens on oboe, banjo and glockenspiel) sing a personal vision of biblical odes so skewed they virtually invent a new religion. Consider a musical storyline as complex and self-developed as Henry Darger’s obsessive sketchpad mythological warfare, and you’re dwelling in similarly dedicated, original, and some might even say crazy, waters.
Joined by 25 of his closest musical friends and relatives, Smith’s songs on Ships compile one of the year’s strongest statements of epic songcraft and nut-job imagination. Opening with the aptly named "Ship The Majestic Suffix," an EP’s worth of grand ideas stuffed into less than three minutes, Ships takes off running and doesn’t stop. Smith’s twisted pop sensibilities (never quite so finely hewn as on "Did I Step on Your Trumpet?," "Cast It at the Setting Sail" and the lengthy "Kids Pushing Kids") somehow find a maniacal middle ground between experimental performance art and a high school marching band. While to some Smith’s voice is easily compared to fingernails on a chalkboard, there are few vocalists so convinced of their own musical mission that even when he wails like a man possessed, you buy every squeal.
Put simply, Smith is a genius. At turns crazed, gorgeous, annoying and wondrous, Smith’s entire musical output to date (be it as Danielson Famile, Danielsonship, Br. Danielson and now simply Danielson) has existed in service to the development of Ships – and that says an awful lot.
|
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.