See My Friends – Ray Davies (Universal)

It’s interesting to observe the different approaches currently being taken by various legendary artists to keep their legacy alive and breathing. Just today, in a JB-Hi store, I was confronted by the number of box sets, greatest hits compilations, re-packaged and re-mastered albums. There’s duets albums, tribute albums and albums matched with books, DVD’s, bonus downloads and t.shirts. It feels like just about every angle is being covered in the quest to wring every last drop of blood from great catalogues.

As an aside, I wonder how many of todays new artists will be given the opportunity to build such catalogues. I suspect very few. But that’s another debate.

Of all the re-workings of great catalogues this contribution by Ray Davies surely feels like one of the most joyous. He’s taken the “duets” route – re-recording some great songs from his extensive repertoire with fans and admirers who have been impacted by his work.

This isn’t the place to extol the virtues of the Ray Davies songbook – if you are not already aware of the depth and importance of his songs then you probably wouldn’t have been moved to read this far anyway! Suffice to say he has a multitude of truly great songs at his disposal and they have been well selected here.

The album opens with Better Things, a song that could easily have been written for or buy Bruce Springsteen. The two voices are contrasting, Springsteen’s gruff, robust vocal combining well with Davies thinner, reedier and needier approach. The song works, but its only an entrée to what is to come.

There are some absolute gems sprinkled across the album. Jackson Browne contributes to an incredibly gentle rendition of Waterloo Sunset. It loses the urban, London jauntiness of the original and becomes a delicate, very soulful acoustic ballad.  The late Alex Chilton combines with Davies and LA band The 88 to re-produce Til The End of The Day, a song that Big Star had already covered and the approach reflects that style. Davies lets Chilton dominate the vocal.

Who would have thought  Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora would actually elevate Celluloid Heroes? They do a great job, giving the song some added muscle without detracting from its extraordinary pathos. The same could be said for Lola – its probably the bravest choice on the album because its just so iconic in its original form, but British soul singer Paloma Faith does it justice and then some. She sings the song superbly, but more importantly she brings another type of understanding and perspective to the lyric. It’s not a song you can just ‘sing’, you’ve got to inhabit it  and that’s exactly what she does. And Davies subtle vocal parts provide a brilliant balance to Paloma’s inspired efforts.

But even that is not my highlight. That comes from another unexpected source – Billy Corgan. Destroyer was a song that Davies himself plagiarized from his own catalogue, borrowing the riff from All Day And All Of The Night and adding a wonderfully kooky, paranoid lyric.  Here they actually merge the two songs with Corgan doing a memorable job with the partially spoken word lyric.  He sings almost in character – with a wink and sneer and another wink that reveals how accurately he understands both songs of this hybrid.

There’s not a bad track on the album – proving that great songs can be approached in different ways and still be great songs. Other honourable mentions go to Frank Black who reads This Is Where I Belong as a country oriented ballad and Gary Lightbody who provides a fragile vocal to Tired of Waiting.

The overall impact of this album is joyful celebration of a masterful songwriter and it’s a long way removed from being a cynical exercise in mining a catalogue.

Tired Pony – The Place We Ran From (Fiction/Shock)

This album is the first from a collaboration instigated by the lead singer of Irish band Snow Patrol, a guy named Gary Lightbody. Apparently Snow Patrol are rather big, primarily as a result of a huge hit called Chasing Cars which achieved recognition via being on a television shows named Grey’s Anatomy.

All of this information is stuff that I was vaguely aware of but I have to admit that the music of Snow Patrol is not something that I’ve had much exposure to. I actually became interested in this album due to the identity of some of Lightbody’s collaborators, most notably Peter Buck (of R.E.M.) and fellow R.E.M. alumni, musician Scott McCaughey and recent producer Jacknife Lee. They are also joined by Richard Colburn of lauded Scottish band Belle & Sebastian.

While Buck has a tendency of popping up just about anywhere there is a studio light on he rarely appears on anything less than interesting and so his involvement here certainly made it worth investigating. It seems as though Lee is a common thread being the producer of both R.E.M.’s vastly under-rated Accelerate album and Snow Patrol’s last few releases.

I’ve read a couple of reviews that suggest that this album was intended to be Lightbody’s nod of country but it ended up sounding not that far removed from Snow Patrol, (presumably without the big hit single)

So…that’s the contextual prologue dealt with!

The musical reference points that seem to leap out at me include The Waterboys, The Decemberists and Coldplay, three bands that at first appearance have in common a sweeping approach to their songwriting tempered by an intelligent use of interesting organic instrumentation and impressionistic lyric writing.

Tired Pony cleverly avoid taking most of these songs into the epic realm and keep the grand gestures to a minimum even though a couple of the songs are almost begging for them. Held In The Arms Of Your Words is one example of this. In the less restrained hands this song could have built into a crescendo but instead it burns slowly to better effect.

Dead American Writers is almost a single with it’s buoyant up-tempo swing while the album’s opener NorthWestern Skies manages to capture the spirit of it’s lyrical content superbly – feeling claustrophobic and a threatened. It’s also one of several songs where Buck’s mandolin is a subtle but effective contributor. Iain Archer (a longtime collaborator of Lightbody’s ) takes lead vocals on I Am A Landslide which becomes the album’s ‘folkiest’ tune but one that inherited some Southern Americana flavour from another subtle Buck contribution, this time on banjo.

The Deepest the Ocean Is is a brooding and very gentle song that it one of the best on the album, and is also notable for having instrumental credits for the respective players of “feedback”, “noise”, “rubber duck” and “typewriter”. I can actually imagine this song on an R.E.M. album circa Reveal or Up.

The album closes with Pieces. This song does take the liberty of building to a more panoramic, sweeping climax and it’s final couple of minutes are more cacophonous with a mass of electric guitars creating a harsher and more abrasive sound. But it does this well and as the album’s closer it is well excused the less restrained approach.

This is an album that gets better each time you play it. There is a lot to take in both lyrically and instrumentally and it certainly manages to avoid the feeling of being an indulgent side-project. I’m not sure what the intentions are for the future of Tired Pony, but if it does transpire to be a once-off project it will have been a completely worthwhile one.