Silk And Filth – Album Review

Sunday Driver: Silk And Filth

Out Now

London by way of Cambridge, the band who came up through but musically outlived steampunk, Sunday Driver have a new album of many influences out, with its strange song titles and adventurous travels through various mystical and all too real traditions. MK Bennett has a ball.

That most excellent pop star, Dua Lipa, believes in Radical Optimism, which stresses that the importance of agency and responsibility in an age of fascistic tendency means one’s autonomy is resistance. Her belief is such that her most recent studio album bears the same name. Part of the album is produced by Kevin Parker of Tama Impala, de facto king and figurehead of modern psychedelia.

Whether it’s some secret meeting of the cultural hegemony or simply good timing, the psychedelic vanguard, musical or otherwise, has made a significant return. However, this resurgence does not mirror the pure psychedelia of the ’60s, with its distinctive appropriation of other cultures’ aesthetics, but rather represents a melting pot of the various paths it has taken, roads both travelled and less travelled, and avenues explored. Consider bands as diverse yet interconnected as Goat, Japanese Breakfast, and Glass Beams, linked by a Motorik bassline and an adventurous spirit, a yearning to be anywhere but here. It is in that sense of escapism we more regularly find ourselves in modern times, inner peace through inner space.

Sunday Driver sits nicely in this, but Silk And Filth orbits a number of different suns and finds itself tested by its own parameters more than once, only to return to a state of relative bliss. Malice Scourge begins with the sound of a ship hitting the docks, sitars and sub-bass as the music tells a different story to the apparent voiceless narrative while gasless planets warm up and die out. Silk And Filth, the song, also sounds as if something is settling in a harbour, while an almost gothic vocal melody rests atop the rhythm, and in between the lines moves a sinuous untold horror, a cello sings imperceptible things and tablas hint at an outside source. Halfway through, some sea change causes it to lurch, and it becomes upbeat, funky like Goat, propelled by bass, the whole song transforms into a slow melancholic dance through an unknown history.

Devils, Jacques Brel interpreting Kafka through an insect’s crawl, Portishead in analogue, is a slow walk through an old brothel, the paint peeling from the walls revealing more than its official biography ever would, a haunted beauty roaming the corridors. Bank Job is the eight and a half minute instant classic, a multicultural marvel that keeps you on your toes and up on your feet. Whatever old labels they no longer need might glibly have suggested, they are far from one dimensional, often sounding like different bands within the same song. Bank Job is relatively laid back, like a stroll through an empty village, as the pace picks up and the East meets West, instrumentation rockets into gear, and rhythms drop into and out of the mix.

Panda Ballet puts you in mind of precisely that: a short and beautiful stolen moment of grace, two minutes of onomatopoeic perfection, strings plucked by hand or by hammer to remind you of the country, wherever that may be. Les Amoureuses translates to The Lovers but can equally refer to a book of poetry or a vineyard and is musically an almost grunge affair, with another million added influences from a band of hugely talented polymaths and over-achievers, it is reminiscent of Led Zeppelin 3, the album of retreat written in a Welsh cottage surrounded by nothing.

We Don’t Belong is a South Indian reggae song that simultaneously has a strong Massive Attack vibe and does not feel out of place on an album this thrillingly eclectic anyway. Sunday Driver could compose a song about Latvian jug bands using only samples of famous Latvian jug bands, and it would still be listenable because this band are simpatico. Jazz-like in the way they work off each other and weave the music seamlessly together. They just fit, because some people do.

Red Dragon is a case in point. Sounding initially like a traditional folk song with offbeat backing, it could easily find itself on a Fairport Convention album. The levels of musicianship displayed here and the aching of thought are unparalleled, and because of this, they tell several stories simultaneously. Moreover, there’s a brilliance in its abjection, the rural horror of Straw Dogs and The Wicker Man, as if Lou Reed’s Berlin were rewritten as a Kathak, Lynchian displacement via Appalachian discomfort. And you can dance to it. The Death Of John Company is another short and beautifully sweet instrumental that starts like The Black Parade but ends up a gorgeous few moments of no doubt classically specific piano music if one has that knowledge, but to the less versed, it is a fitting end to an eclectic and stunning piece of collected excellence, dramatic perfection and a theatrical joy.

This album is made by brilliant, focused musicians who understand a self-contained brief, particularly their own, and how to disseminate it accordingly, with no extra fat on its bones yet to express it with the poetry of the truly gifted, radical optimists all, with the sure knowledge that it is needed.