Passing Through
A second album from Graney and Moore for 2024
Regular readers/listeners will be aware of my abiding love for the music of Dave Graney and Clare Moore. They are one of the very few musical partnerships I will make the effort to go and see live. When they venture from the Antipodes to the UK I always find the time and make the effort to enjoy their always excellent performances. In the absence of an extant trip over from Melbourne it is always good to receive new material from them, none more so than their second album for 2024 - “I Passed Through Minor Chord In A Morning”.
In the e-mail carrying the files for the new album Dave says of this release:
Could be called our basement tapes album. (Our studio is downstairs). Could also be our most post punkest of albums. Certainly our most auto-harped album. Some songs started life twenty years ago, some six or seven years ago, two built from processed and distorted sounds recorded almost thirty years ago. Four began life as bass and drum improvisations into a single mic four months before the albums release and two as fresh as two months before it was pronounced cut and printed. After we finished our April 2024 album (strangely)(emotional) Clare Moore suggested I do an album of freewheeling lyrics and perhaps even talking/speaking. That’s where it kind of started.
As with most Graney/Moore releases the line-ups/musicians are fluid. The team for this one is Dave – guitars, bass, autoharp, some keys and some beats and lead vocals, and Clare – keys, vibes, drums, percussion, backing vocals. They are joined by long serving guitarist Stuart Perera who has been a loyal member of the mistLY band since 1998.
For those of you unaware of their work, a brief history
Opening salvo from The Sputniks with one single pre 1978
The Moodists from 1978 to 1986 - mostly in the UK for this period - the “post-punk” period morphing slowly via the White Buffaloes into…..
Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes 1987- 1997 - a more straight ahead rock/pop sound
Thereafter The (Royal) Dave Graney Show, The Lurid Yellow Mist, Dave Graney and the mistLY (and various combinations thereof featuring a range of musicians)……
and finally Dave Graney and Clare Moore (although the mistLY still perform/record and Dave and Clare have had separate solo albums, and other partnerships)
A lot of their work can be found on their Bandcamp Page.
For those of you familiar with their work hitherto I think you need to come at this new release by abandoning your preconceptions of what you think a Dave Graney and Clare Moore album is going to sound like. It is certainly very different from this years earlier album (strangely) (emotional).
In summary Dave explains “Some songs started life twenty years ago, some six or seven years ago, two built from processed and distorted sounds recorded almost thirty years ago. Four began life as bass and drum improvisations into a single mic four months before the albums release and two as fresh as three months ago. There are some two minute songs and several almost ten minute epics”.
The album stars with two short pieces which have echoes of Dave’s work with both Will Hindmarsh (Wam n Daz) and also studio cat/multi instrumentalist Plutonic Lab aka Leigh Ryan.
Elvis Never and Still Got The Truth were slabs of cut and paste chaos which I’d been experimenting with since 2021. I had bought a 4 track cassette recorder and was bouncing sounds into and out of it and bringing them into the digital realm. I had no grid or sequence to cut it all to but I could hear a beat and sang to it and then cut and pasted and deep fried it all some more. I was most happy that the songs were barely two minutes in length.
The traditional Graney “attention to detail” songcraft has been replaced by a looser delivery mechanism here.
Acceptable Back Story and Girls Are Famous came from an improvised session of bass and drums being recorded by one mic and a stereo Zoom recorder in our studio in July 2024 just before we headed off to do some shows interstate. We then forgot about them.
I am trying to find you a frame of reference here but as with most Graney/Moore work it is difficult to find a useful musical comparator. It is much easier to draw a comparison with literary references. As Dave narrates a complex semi auto biographical tale on Acceptable Back Story I am drawn back to the written works of William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Steve Erickson, Ed Dorn, and the density of John Cowper Powys, Iain Sinclair, Paul Auster, and, Alan Moore. At a push I guess you can draw a musical comparison, at least in verbal delivery, with some aspects of Jim Morrison’s solo work? Musically it’s closer to The Necks than The Doors though. Repetition in the music and we’re never gonna lose it as the bard of Prestwich once said.
The “single” is moody groover with submarine bass, sexy keyboard sounds and auto-harp swirls.
Parking Lot Scene takes its title from a movie about Grateful Dead fans who would gather in force and go off piste in the parking lots around the giant venues they would play…. studio improvisation that happened when I learned how to loop a drum beat.
Jazz references, repeated motifs, impressionistic and enticing, loose/louche delivery, a simple but effective solo guitar line at the end. What was that he just said? The music supports the words, acts a bed allowing the narrative to breathe. Although it is not a conventional narrative.
Did You Have Servants? is the most “rock” piece on the album. A guitar riff with echoes of Keef, strangely the drums are mixed low, the stop-start structure adds tension, a more conventional song structure I guess. Dave as cool dude rocking out in some smoky club. A single cymbal stroke closes it off. Familiar but different in equal measure.
I’d Rather the Frills goes back to 2004 and an experiment with open D tuning and some 12 string raga guitar moments.
At first you think, Roger McGuinn, but then structurally it morphs into a circular repeating message. This is contemporary with the Hashish and Liquor period of their work and represents the transition between the Royal Dave Graney Show band and the mistLY, although, in feel at least, there are echoes of 2000’s Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye album. It is hypnotic.
1985 has an “In A Silent Way” feel with repeating jazzy guitar chords and a late night vibe - Dave as Dashiel Hammett narrating via short phrases some half forgotten history, swathes of sizzling sound, a Grant Green like solo, steady drums from Clare, cymbals at the fore. Effortless and cool.
A Rampart Across Time was a piece of music recorded to his phone in 2021 by Stuart Perera which I turned into a song and sang along to. Stuart added some more guitar parts.
Clare brings out the vibes for the title track.
……….was started by Clare Moore with a beat, keyboard bass and vibes in 2008 and she had Stuart Perera play some guitar on it. Its been sitting in the archives since then. The lyric is talking about Minor Chord as a physical place - a town that the singer passes through.
Mersey becomes Mercy as Dave plays with words - almost a dream like peroration, an eloquent discourse - the song structure again allows Dave the space to explore - is this a form of improvisation, the words/voice as a solo instrument? References to guitar elements/parts, words spill out, seemingly unconnected.
Emcee Bitz is a lyric about performing your life
More jazzy vibes, back beats, it transforms into a complex layered piece, full of atmosphere.
I’m Against it (whadda you got?) Has a title riffed from the Wild One movie and Marlon Brandos classic line. Music based on a rhythm track from 2016.
Perhaps the most conventional song structure on the album - an enticing piece of work with lots of vocal layers.
Et Tu Doudou dates from 2018 and concerns a story Georgio “the Dove” Valentino (who we had just been touring with) told us about a childhood totem he had taken with him on an epic journey of many years from Florida and around the USA and Europe and the trauma he felt when it was stolen.
Rich and complex the penultimate track on the album has many facets and demands further listening. Almost orchestral in construction it builds and builds before capitulating to its own internal pressure.
Final track The Trojan Egg was built up from the skeleton of a song that appeared on the Fearful Wiggings album in 2014. An interesting way to close a collection but perhaps appropriate in that it encapsulates what has gone before. The conventional has now become experimental, all of the familiar “Graney-isms” are here but they are part of something different.
The sign of a good album is that you immediately want to go back and listen to it again. As someone who listens to at least three new albums a day as part of the process of creating the World of Jazz and Different Noises Shows the chances these days of listening to a new album more than once are small. With this one there is a compulsion to return to it - the verbal dexterity alone is sufficient to warrant repeat listenings but the difference in the music on offer this time from Dave and Clare also draws me back to it.
You can get it, and a t-shirt, here!
