Revere Reach

Tracklisting

01 Distant Buzzing
02 In Converse
03 Lifeblood
04 Be Here Steryear
05 A Husk
06 The Blind Boy
07 Clack Dance
08 Heart Of Oak
09 The Catford Clown
10 Liferaft
11 Castaway
12 Revere Reach
13 Orlando

Biog

For his fifth solo excursion, former Cardiacs keysmith William D Drake takes us on a serpentine path through the inner regions of Revere Reach, a part-imagined landscape composed of memory and fantasy. At once heart-felt, hearty and absurd, its heady reveries blend ancient-seeming modal folk melody with an obliquely slanted Rock thrust.

Anchored around the gutsy centrepiece of 'Heart Of Oak', a maritime mover with sinuous hurdy-gurdies snapping at its stern, the surreal rubs tooth-by-jowl with the unabashedly romantic. Andrea Parker and Drake's twining vocals clear a perfect moment of stillness within 'In Converse', re-imagining J M Synge's sublime Irish odyssey. The dulcitone and choral chant of 'Be Here Steryear' recalls the unfathomable circling thoughts of a moment of waking or falling asleep. Drake's dark-hued vocals and insistent harmonium propel 'The Blind Boy', driving a defiant splendour into eighteenth-century poet-laureate Colley Cibber's words. With its caressing push and pull tempo, husky sax and lacrimose musical saw, 'Castaway' has the sultry lilt of a long-lost recording committed to wax on some dizzyingly hot evening in the 1930s.

From the opening stomp of 'Distant Buzzing' to the 'genie back in the bottle' parting squeal of 'Orlando', Revere Reach is Drake's richest and most captivating set to date.