Reviews

Songdog
Album: Mirabilia Mundi
Label: Junkyard Songs
Tracks: 10
Website: https://www.songdog.co.uk

The title (taken from the book by 3rd century Latin author Solinus) translating as wonders of the world, sounding vocally and stylistically like a Welsh speak-sing cross between Jacques Brel and Steve Harley with a dash of Cave and Cohen for good measure, having released his previous album under his own name, poet-playwright-novelist-singer-songwriter Lyndon Morgans returns with long-time musical partner Karl Woodward and violinist Bethan Frieze for the ninth as his folk noir musical alias, although themes of time passing, trying to make sense of a disappearing world, things ending, and a reflecting on long-lost glory days remain a constant.

It's the latter than informs the opening carousel waltzing, piano-shaded and brass burnished melancholia of the 'Ding Dong Daddy', wistfully looking back at past loves ("Miss Palmer drew my likeness on the label of a bottle of champagne, she drew me thumping my chest like a gorilla and sparking up a Molotov cocktail…. Connemara Kate is putting on weigh/I hugged her hard enough to make a diamond out of her/Her smile kind of reminds me of summers long gone/I've martyred so many guitars writing songs for her") and the one that broke him ("I used to be a real ding-dong daddy till Mercy took off and moved away"), addressing guilt ("I've broken hearts and I've done things for which I never could atone") and contemplating growing older ("I've been living one heartbeat at a time") and mortality ("I always keep my grave-suit good and ready"), faced with the awareness of "How small a life can end up being", grasping at straws as he protests "underneath this hairshirt I got amazing muscle tone" and declares "So I'll dance to the glory of the shit and the chic and when I'm done will someone carry me home?"

That sense of time's erosion ("Me life chased off a cliff and I've been treading thin air, I've thickened out a lot, I got belly to spare, the years take their toll") and memory of a former singer lover ("you were brains, sex and artist in one multipack, your legs swinging from that stool a real aphrodisiac, you kind of reminded me of Tuesday Weld… if I'd kept my dreams small I might've been alright/You said/ It's over, Casanova, I guess we've come unstuck and we clinked beer-bottles three times just for luck") are also there in the forlorn, strings swathed 'Eucharist' ("Where's that man I used to be?/With this rum I summon thee, thou old demon …."), the only song to mention Mozart, Metallica and the Dave Clark Five in the same line "and for an encore some bebop and the Jukebox Jive". And again it comes with a resigned acceptance that "even Everest, right, must wear away in the end".

The mind drifts further back down the years with the sparse piano and strings 'Voodoo Pin' to "childhood playfights in the grass with the sisters up the lane/I'd stamp out a beat and they'd twirl for me, Babs and Jane/The blades of an old wind-gauge creaking in the breeze, rain speckling the road as we'd walk home picking at fries") and of youthful ambitions ("I never could walk a straight line but dreamt I'd blaze my name on history's arse") that fall away leaving "a broken heart for hire, a rented tuxedo of a man" when he scratches where it don't itch and his forever love takes off with someone else ("Her new man's some kind of Polynesian lord,so her life's all coming and holidays abroad"). Along with a poetic metaphor ("the priest popped the hood of my heart, fell to his knees, said he'd pray for me"), there's an overwhelming sense of sadness and regrets as he sings ("One snowy night in Brixton town, I knocked her door, she slid the chain/I'd hoped we'd throw our hats in the air and just dance in the snow/Her chemise swished as she moved, she said she had a hangman upstairs in her bed, if she called him down I was dead, so don't haunt her door again". You imagine some vintage black and white French movie of a doomed amour fou, most probably directed by Alain Renais.

Taking a steady slow marching rhythm, that retro ambience hangs heavy across the title track, a list song where the lyrics are an ironic counterpoint to the title in their portrait of the zeitgeist ("I saw burnt-out tanks scattered across the land, cows trembling with panic at the bolt-gun ma/I saw the devil drag home a soul along the railroad tracks/I saw a guy bump his head on the sun, high on cough-syrup and whisky-macs/I saw bad-ass girls and no-good boys/I saw fakes, I saw phonies… I saw junk rolling on the tide… I saw the world and all it contained, I looked in hearts and inside heads/I saw a man hum a lullaby as he primed a bomb"). The reference to Nietzsche's plum trees evokes Also sprach Zarathustra and his statement "God is dead", informing the bitter closing lines "I never did see God, I never felt him close, he made a world so full of pain then he upped the dose".

He's a touch more darkly playful on the ruminatively fingerpicked 'Napoleon' ("I only got born for a bet, doodled by some demon trying out a pen as foretold by a holy book, the Gobshite's Gospel page one hundred and ten"), but the jaded, cynical worldview is much the same ("Life's a dancefloor they promised, so I danced to the bells on a jester's cap…they bought me a popgun and some brogues, christened me Napoleon/They gave me a heart hung together by glue and tape and for a home the finest architect in the land built me a castle of rags and Styrofoam"). Again the shabby spectre of mortality lurks in its shadows ("I only showed up at my funeral for a dare, the wake was at a flophouse on Valhalla Lane/They passed around old polaroids of me from the days I'd rock around the clock and back again/Some called me troubadour, others refused to speak ill of the dead").

There's a poetic Bukowski romance air to the wryly titled almost dreamy 'Kingdom Come Came And Went' ("We jizzed, we jazzed, drank highballs, we did some weed, we did some beers and talked of childhood, love and death and how the gods feast on human tears/She stood at my window in the moonlight, listening to the rain/The one-bar heater buzzed all night long") with its strings, puttering drums and electric guitar buzzes. Laced with evocative phrases ("life is hard enough, I guess, without the bad reviews…She's full of Christmas cracker wisdom but she's an artist in the sack… My heart felt like an early draft of a masterpiece never to be writ"), once more it conjures memories of a passing brief encounter ("The clouds lifted for a while, the sun was blazing on the courthouse mezzanine and with a flick of her tail she was gone just as if she'd never been") with its Proustian "I have her scent still on my fingers".

Throughout the album, the protagonists - whether autobiographical or fictional - are bruised romantics, some broken and rusted, others still with a faint spark in the engine, perhaps no more so that in 'So Sentimental' where he again conjures almost Beat Generation poetic imagery with lines like "I guess I will till life calls time on me, sends another poor schmuck to live a life like mine, and his heart will shed leaves like winter trees, leaves that will never grow back/but the sun'll shine alike on scumbags and saints and cats dream on window-sills in sunshine and rain" and the wretchedness of growing old "he'll kill himself slow, one glass at a time….He'll have a photo of his love in cold dawn light, she'll have binned him like some childhood doll". This isn't a raging against the dying of the light, rather the pathos of resignation captured in how "He'll nod along to Sidney Bechet and the stuff they'll play at that two-chair barbershop, or watch the wind wrinkling the pond or the bald, bandy busker do the lindy hop…the wind'll play a song he'll half-know, eternity's all they'll have left to share, he'll only wear his laurel-leaf crown to hide his thinning hair/He'll have joint burns on all his shirts, drive a clown's car, parts falling away". And yet "the stuff he'll make up will be as true as the truth and he'll get so sentimental".

Having opened with a ding dong, the album heads to a close with a 'Ramalama', another Proustian wander through temps perdu ("as a kid you'd walk the greenwood with Israeli Jack or climb in the wardrobe and hide among the heavy winter coats/Watch time fly off the calendar like in some corny old film, racing time-lapse clouds") and those glory days of promises yet unbroken (" Life was as sweet then as a July skylark's song/In your rhinestone choker and showing so much skin, you'd light up the sky then for those testo-junky mummies' boys/High on the ramalama of just being alive in the world, youth was a shot no-one was ever going to pour you again, holding court in a corner seat at Guido's, cheap speed in a brown paper bag, some cowpunk wannabe whining from a makeshift stage"). Then fast forwarding "Forty years on, years of hustle and grind, buckled hearts and future running low, watching the froth run down inside your glass…a queen in exile finally going home".

Launching another metaphor and further musician imagery, life becomes 'The Great Galleon' "drifting west into the night" as we sail the seas of could have beens and never weres "tallying up all my regrets and listening to a man at the bar talking balls to some other guy" as time burns you down "like a flame does a candle" and all you have are "years of disappointment buried deep by gin and fake bonhomie".

It ends, though, with the sexual heat of 'Showtime' and defiance against the dimming of the light ("Let the markets spike and dip, bring on the hoopla and the hype/I'll be the flophouse pharaoh, you my beautiful Zen princess/I'll buy you a black Montera hat and a thousand pound dress, we'll tear up the town, change every no to a yes/I'll hunt down diamonds in dung-heaps, never mind the mess") and a last grasp at passion ("tell me all your kinks and I'll do the same, let's live our lives all over again, but this time in excelsis…Let's be like two kids up a lane declaring undying love/We'll step over the corpses, keep on keeping the faith/I'll subscribe to your site if you have one/We'll send our shadows out walking so we can stay in bed"). It ends in the exultation "We'll dance the tango in all the places where angels fear to tread, I'll grow a pompadour like Elvis/There'll be good days galore when we get our go on the swings/ Every night shall be showtime with us topping the bill and a queue outside snaking round the block".

While mortality, loss and failed dreams loom large, through Morgan's deeply poetic words and the simple but intoxicating melodies, this isn't an album about regrets and disconsolation but one that celebrates having lived a life and all those moments - both of success and failure - that reminded you how alive you were.

Mike Davies

Previous	Next
The All Seeing I: Pickled Eggs & Sherbert	Simin Tander: The Wind

Recent Reviews

G Flat Gumbo

Fatea Showcase Sessions

The Fatea Showcase Sessions are a series of downloads featuring acts that we've really enjoyed and think that more people should get the chance to hear.

Pirate is the current session and features 16 fantastic artists check out the website to find out more about them and download your copy

www.fatea-showcase-sessions.co.uk for all the artist information.

Visit The FATEA Archive!