Sabato 28 Gen 2012, 15:04
I first chanced on Flipron in a tent in the Huntingdon countryside at the Secret Garden Party Festival three years ago - a mad weekend of the most outlandish sights you‘ll ever see. But never mind how outlandish all the revelling there was - like a Mardi-Gras inside a Looney Tunes cartoon, the craziest thing was Flipron. By far. It was late at night when we drifted into that tent, and the band had the place buzzing like the most authentic haunted-house you’d ever seen; there in the middle of it all, crouched over first a lap-steel, then Hawaian guitar, then mandolin, then accordion, the wiry-haired Jesse Budd, who I’d soon realise was a maverick with zero peers in the current pop climate.
I framed a whole festival article around Budd’s lyrics, which stuck in my head even though the band, their general sound and festivity was such a spectacle in itself. It was like stumbling on a show-band conducted by a lost poet in a Tim Burton Wonderland, the effect long-standing and slow-burning. Two albums of sumptuous, wiry, baroque pop kept the Flipron flame burning in my quarters for the next two years, along with a few more live gigs, each of which revealed a different, hugely-satisfying layer to the band, before the new Gravity Calling came though the post late last year, a treasure-box of songs that takes the old sound and sails even further into sumptuous musical waters.
Budd has described Gravity Calling as Flipron “stripped down” to its essentials like a drag racing car, and Budd himself in it has gained another degree of lyrical gravitas, grown another hand full of magic dust, especially in a couple of songs that twinkle around the album’s moon with a particularly blinding glow. These two songs are ’Orpheus Inconsolable’, which steps out of a casual walking-whistle into a poetic, melodic mystery tour where a glimpse of lost love is the recurring treasure; and ’A Scoundrel’s Apology, Almost’, a song that drifts with a piano that sounds like it’s played by a melancholy ghost from the ’50s, in which Budd’s lyricism is so eloquent and touching that it approaches magical poeticism. ‘A Scoundrel’s Apology’ is as good as something Rumi would have written after ever having felt himself to have even slightly betrayed a love, as if in an attempt to cast light and beauty on a thing that’s pulling him apart.
And the whole album has this certain inspiration which makes it stand out with Rumi-like charm, a certain spiritual embrace of the colour of language informing each song. ‘Winding Up the Clockwork Morning Through the Night’ has this intricacy in which Budd as a songwriter bursts aeons beyond the band’s albeit brilliant show-exuberance, his hoary, star-serenading voice trembling as he sings a song of sunny wonder directly to his love. ’Something Lost’ is another touchingly melodic celebration of love in the face of ever-encroaching time, Joe Atkinson’s easily-twinkling virtuoso piano and an odd squeeze of organ dancing through it. And then the show-pieces, which are like Rumi’s Greatest Hits, songs that could make Tim Burton’s Wonderland erupt in dancing fever, and still have the Flipron heart.
Flipron’s party songs hit the pleasure button with a certain lustre, Budd crawling through mythological hells and coming up in bountiful pleasure gardens. ‘Dreams of Wealth and Power’ has a new addition to the Flipron cannon - the Flipronettes - on cooing backing vocals, a rollocking guitar from space, subtle organ and piano flourishes that lift it high up off the ground. It’s a stormy, tempestuous, ambitious and magnificent pop song in which Budd holds onto his delicate love in the storm. “There are forces and functions and mysterious powers in the burning of stars and in the trembling of the tiniest flowers / and there’s nothing that can save you from falling - there’s nothing that doesn’t hear the voice of gravity calling” is the call of impending doom that’ll lead to love in the magnificently bone-shaking title track, full again of unlikely musical wonder. ‘Tropical Disease’ is slightly different dream, a frenzied, comical celebration of sensuality with merry organ flourishes poking out fantastically in its excitable whirl; and ‘Zombie Blues‘, where Budd plays the lead mummy singing a song of a dead-man’s enchanted rebellion, hearing “the moans of a new nation - of a great zombie choir”, can send a shiver up the spine.
Gravity Calling is - like the two albums that preceded it - a rare treasure, one to make you sit up and wonder, feel joyous at music and its possibilities. It matches subtle sensuality to beautiful redemption, material mystery to spiritual enchantment; it has the kind of tempos Rumi could have written poems to, and the kind of lyrics that would have made his dervish come home. Budd and his band are firmly outside the box, singing what they see in the most colourful, soulful revelry, re-writing the pop rule-book for anyone who dares to dream and feel ecstatic. To see or to hear them is a recurring pleasure.
© 2009 Neil Jones
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