UNDERWORLD
Strawberry Hotel (Smith Hyde Productions/Virgin)
“IS THIS A kissing book?”
Yeah, there was a bit of a Princess Bride moment as I was thinking about the 11th studio album from Rick Smith and Karl Hyde. A question hovering, a warning imminent. All because it occurred to me that you can feel better listening to music. You will feel better listening to Strawberry Hotel. The world, even if only for 68 minutes, does seem more than just bearable.
Oh God, I could almost hear some of you ask, is this a hippy dippy record? No, but you do emerge from it reaffirmed in some basic truths about yourself, and maybe even in others, the kind that can easily be obliterated in a torrent of enemies within, hey come on doesn’t everybody get free upgrades whenever they want, wipe them from the face of the earth, drill drill drill.
Not because its lyrics are wired to joy particularly; as ever with Hyde, specifics often are elusive, language sometimes is just sound, the implications of darkness have not disappeared. Nor is it because Smith has flicked the switch to euphoric dance or dreamy oblivion; things are more complicated than that, as we will soon see. It’s because there is a tone here, a longer-lasting attitude, that settles in and leaves its own imprint.
In one sense this is made obvious in the graceful quasi-choral opening track, the all too brief Black Poppies, with its pulse just a low-in-the-mix piano chord and almost thrown away bits of horn sounds, and Hyde’s voices asserting a list of trusts in someone that culminate in “you are, you are beautiful”. But this track is also a feint because much of the first half of the record is set in propulsion and shifting shapes.
Among them, Techno Shinkansen (a song that we can only hope in its live form will be three or four times longer than its current three minutes, for full immersion) is a fast train smoothly rolling, inexorably onwards and slightly elevating, blurring exteriors as its electric piano integrates with synthesisers, raising lights from dimmed to vibrating. And The Colour Red throbs in brittleness, scatters bleeps and squelches under an intoning “don’t speak, don’t speak”, and holds its form as if mesmerised into position.
Sweet Lands Experience finds a kind of bags-on-the-floor community disco brightness within its strut, even as Hyde dry-smiles a more disquieting “I was more smashed than you were … studs like tiny stars”, Hilo Sky brings pastoral Pink Floyd to the shiniest of rooms, Lewis In Pomona rattles its cage to invite us in rather than look to escape, and Denver Luna – relentless in its rapid bass and drums, discombobulating in its scattered images – picks up passengers the further it goes, including metallic synths that scrape like guitars, “Mickey Mouse in the window”, and more of this album’s signature layered in choirs vocals.
While the tempo changes in the second half of the album, it is the night beyond rather than the morning after that we are in. Not a comedown or recovery, not a chill room, but a continued exploration at more considered pace. Which is why Ottavia, where Smith’s daughter, the singer Esme Bronwen-Smith, channels Nero’s wife in a spoken vocal that bites with sharpness and yet allows wry humour to hover at the edge, stretches interpretation. And why the drive-by Oh Thorn! feels like time loosened even as its words tumble over each other.
Settling into the expansive Gene Pool, the almost tinkling, fluid early minutes find Hyde looking through half-shut eyes that gradually widen as the atmosphere expands like slowly opening pod bay doors. Not much has changed since those opening minutes and yet, ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space.
Which is exactly where we and guest co-vocalist, Nina Nastasia, find ourselves through the wobbly tethered-drift of Iron Bones, a song that at first feels like an ending, a letting go. However, as the picked-acoustic final track, Stick Man Test, begins to pull us back to the mothership on its gently ruminative progression, Iron Bones now looks like an easing, an act of trust.
Grandpa, maybe you can come over and play it again to me tomorrow.
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