"“It’s hard walking forwards in a backwards world”"
During the two years following next to the quitting of School Of Fish, Josh Clayton-Felt learned to handle keyboards, bass and drums in addition to his main instrument, guitar, whilst recording music in a quite lo-fi California studio called The Tree House, playing all instruments by himself. But, recorded by the guy alone and lo-fi as it is, he makes the songs sound as tight as if they were recorded by a well rehearsed group, and he sure managed to avoid any complications which might be an unwanted side effect of a record produced by a unexperienced producer. Simply put, it sounds as good as any 90’s record (the 70’s ruled!) and that probably proves that the guy had a good ear for music. Right, the record is much less intense than the School Of Fish records were; no reversed riffing, no hard-rocking tunes, but rather a gentle, genuine output with a lot of sould put into, sometimes quite similar to art-rock acts like Pink Floyd, though mostly being a very special little singer/songwriter album by a guy with a very peculiar, smooth voice. Positive tones are mixed with some rather introspective ones, but with Josh’s obvious love of making nusic as a throughoutly going element. There’s always something going on in the songs, whether you’re listening carefully or just listening for the sake of having a record on, there’s the concrete hooks for the easy listening, and the small details that makes the album good also as a way to kill some 53 minutes whenever you’re bored. The record is very consistent, and is a great listening at any mood, any time of the day – just as perfect for your beautiful summerday as for your depressed, rainy autumn evening. There’s really nothing wrong with this record, and anybody with a vague love for pop music should enjoy it quite hugely.
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After touring around the States with Tori Amos,
Josh Clayton-Felt got his deserved place in college rock radio. Guess touring
with Tori might have its benefits...Especially now that she has a quite big
and varied audience. Anyhow, Josh went back into the studio, this time working
with various guest musicians and in a slightly more hi-fi studio, in order to
make his next record sounding technically better. In fact, though, that doesn’t
really matter – Josh played all instruments with perfect adequacy on the earlier
album, as well as producing the stuff as good as anybody. It’s the songs which
differ; on the previous album they were all going smoothly out of the speakers,
all the time varying in structure and mood in order not to let it get boring,
but each song were hardly more than unpolished diamonds. This time around, he
managed to pick up all the best things of the other disc – the consistency,
the ideas and the sound – and make it even better with more memorable hooks,
less “noisy” rock tunes like “Soon Enough”, “Better Than Me” and “Another Dead
American”, while great, the gentle side of Josh is what I love the most. And,
most importantly; it seems to come right out Josh’s heart, there’s lots of love
and soul put down in this recording. And, just as on the previous album, one
of the greatest things is the never boring songs – never a dull moment, to quote
Tommy Lee (I guess this is not the right place to quote THAT guy, really...but
anyway). But, something happens in the songs all the time, and the only song
which I don’t wholly enjoy, because of its comparatively stupid melody and the
repeating all over the track, is “Kid On The Train”. ALL the other songs are
little, or in some cases, multi-carat diamonds in your CD collection. Little,
throughoutly gentle pop songs like “Backwards World” should be impossible for
anybody to resist; and that trombone is really gorgeous. It reminds me of Liberation
by Divine Comedy, though without the pompous vocals of Neil Hannon.
Which might be a plus. Then we have this great tragedy of Josh’s death – just
while putting the finishing touch to the record, Josh fell ill with a particularly
nasty kind of testicular cancer, and after just less than a month in hospital,
the guy passed away in january 2000, some mere 32 years old. The last song of
the album, “Dragon Fly”, is the last song he recorded, and he did it with a
good sense of optimism while looking at his coming death. I don’t know what
Pain-relieving drugs he might have been on by then (I know from my own mother
that she was so fed up with morphine during her last months in life, that she
could hardly speak), but the song is probably quite sober, although unlike most
of the other songs on here. It has some calm, few-chord verses with choruses
within, with a very tuned-down, moody and well fed up sound picture, and also
with this “I’ll be okay” underlaid message. For you who are quite into Swedish
music, it’s in places VERY similar to Freddie Wadling’s rendition
of “Lasarettvisan”, but I realize that this is a comparation not suitable for
everyone...However, against what the singer intended, the song makes me miss
him even more. And damn, when the guy wrote “Already Gone” and “Too Cool For
This World”, the guy yet didn’t know he was going to die!
Anybody really realized what a great songwriter this guy was? It’s likely not
to, because now that A&M had an album without a living author to put out on
the market, they lost interest and dropped the album, damn shame. Thanks to
an enthusiastic family and a bunch of friends, though, Dreamworks compiled the
material and released it as this album two years later. Not with the introduction
it deserves, but who wants to put money into an artist which can’t tour? According
to the success of Aaliyah lately, though, I guess the record companies maybe
did a miss there...Anyway, I think it’s still in print in the US, so everybody
should get their ass going and money swirling and get the album as soon as possible;
now! – within a year, I fear that this record might get permanently out of print,
so hurry! It’s also a shame, on purely sell-out basis, that he passed away that
early – if he had had another year of living, I’m certain that the guy would
have got the breakthrough he deserved all the time. With magnificient pop songs
like “Building Atlantis” and “Spirit Touches Ground”, as well as sweet, beautiful
ballads like “Waiting To Be” and “Deer In The Headlights”, nothing else than
a reluctant record company could’ve stopped him. If he had died by then, some
year and a breakthrough later, he would surely have got similar sympathetic
listeners like those Aaliyah and Jeff Buckley have nowadays. That’s a true shame
as well. Let’s hope that a cult similar to that one which has arosen around
Jeff Buckley, Nick Drake and, er, Ritchie
Valens will also arise around Josh Clayton-Felt, shall
we? This is one of the greatest of all missed masterpieces of the rock era,
or at least the greatest one of those I’ve heard, but the meaning with forgotten
stuff is that nobody knows about it nowadays, right? The 10 is VERY close...
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