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    • Aug 5

KEVIN PURDY – KEVIN PURDY: REVIEW


KEVIN PURDY

Kevin Purdy (Soft/MGM)

 

If it is in some sense the exception that proves the rule, the track Rooms Full Of Elephants – a slowly spiralling drone meeting a dark highway cruiser on an album which leans decidedly pop – also serves as a confirmation of the overall tenor of this album.


No longer operating only as Purdy and now offering his full name as album title to boot – could we say he’s climbing that stairway to Kevin? Hmm, maybe not. Sorry. – the multi-instrumentalist songwriter has pulled together tracks from a decade or so for this project. If this suggests the possibility of a patchwork collection, that would be wrong.


Across its near eight minutes, Rooms… takes psychedelia in hand, shifting perspective both within and without: from barely awake contemplation and the weight of something foretold, to insistent propulsion and tangible tension, so that listening evokes a physical more than a thinking response.


In the track after it, Oceans In Time, Kevin Purdy uses that drone sense but now as something that feels like a surf song written by someone who lives on a lake: vaguely tropical, slightly dreamy and modulating rather than cascading, even as it begins to crash in its last minute. In the track before it, Sunlight Loves You, he slowly introduces tension into an exceedingly pretty base of guitar, tambourine and low key trumpet: the tension is not at all sufficient, or intended, to displace the gentle flow but it encroaches at the edges, like the beginning of shadow.


All three tracks are, to borrow from the title of an earlier song, elusive trails. They present as one thing, hint at more, then don’t actually resolve, except as part of a longer story. The effect is just trippy enough to alter the state of listening. And this is not uncommon.


The album opens with the low-temperature, wheezy, murmured fare of Home Away From Home, which keeps its shape hazy even as it can’t help but throw golden pop moments at you that shine through that haze. The Long Shot, a loping, slightly out of focus song that suggests Syd Barrett as a country music fan, is deceptively attractive, and not so deceptively bent just enough, and serves as a bridge to Elusive Trails, which hints at North Africa and Canterbury, offers a jaunty direction and then fades away.


But before you can decide if you or Purdy has lost the point, we are at Sunlight Loves You and the next wave begins. It isn’t disorienting; it says all directions are acceptable.


This means that by the time you reach the closing Count Sand, it somehow feels appropriate that its intersection of inner city stomp and downtown saxophone blurs more lines, this time between art rock and a kind of post-punk jazz. You can see the outline of the buildings Purdy has built but not the façades; those you have to imagine yourself. It’s properly psychedelic.



 

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