Dead City Sunbeams

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Every so often a record hits the doorstep which gets everything so utterly "right" that I can only marvel at how and why no one else had made the same album sooner. Not that others haven't been trying, mind you. Kid Silver's old band, Rollerskate Skinny, came very close with Horsedrawn Wishes, a frustrating case of the-tree-falling-in-the-forest, if ever there has been one. The Boo Radleys, Spiritualized, The High Llamas and (especially) Mercury Rev have also entered this sweepstakes, but they have yet to so brilliantly fulfill the promise of their earlier albums. Those four names also happen to provide a (very) rough outline of the terrain bordering the pop Elysium which Ken Griffin has staked out on Dead City Sunbeams. Note the punchy "Its Lulu" horns which bolster "Racing Daylight," the glammy Morricone-fied discofolkfunk (it works, too!) of "Scarecrow" and the coyly curdled cinematic psychedelia of "My Electric Sky and "Breadcrumbs." Soak up the sleepy drone gris-gris of "Keep Warm;" saddle up and ride the sauntering "Dont Bring Tears to a Table" into the Hawaiian sunset. With nary a whit of affectation, Griffin also traverses the aerial heights of Scott Walker ("67 Cities of Light," with a token incantation every bit as perplexing as Mr. Engels "Do I hear twenty-one?") and the Tolk-ien rapier whimsy and romanticism of Robert Wyatt (for whom Griffin suddenly becomes a dead ringer on "24 Last Days of the Lilac.") The array of sun-drenched sounds on display would suggest that Griffin laid his Kid gloves on a Chamberlin, the Holy Grail of pop weapons, and the relatively restrained allowance of electronic beats and bleepschmittel show an efficiency his maximalist colleagues should envy. He only goes overboard once or twice, stuffing drum n bass programming into "Layabout Superstars" and "Punchdrunk," pop confections already fit to burst. But this Kid's real strength is in his tunes! What tunes! So beautiful and strange, and yet so comfortable! Griffin's voice is up to the task, earning him comparisons with Stephen "Babybird" Jones or early Bono even if it's unlikely to win a crooning contest with Butterfly Child's Joe Cassidy or mead-tongued Euros Childs and John Lawrence of Gorkys Zygotic Mynci. Griffin alone was born to carry these arching, wriggling melodies, chorus upon chorus, and they in turn were plucked from the air to be sung by no one else. So let's see. Here we have an album, bedecked with all the modern frills and filigree one could want in this post-B&S age, which actually soars on the strength of songcraft. Watch it sink without a trace. Please prove me wrong.