Well, this is a thing of beauty and wonder is it not? When making music that is adjacent to pop music, albeit a popular music that honours the standards and craftsman like processes of the past far more than the committee produced formular driven electronic pop that we hear so much of today, creating something as fantastically satisfying on a musical level as this is actually damn hard work. Realising sounds that push and pull the heart strings, rise and fall like a living breathing entity, that can caress the ears and nourish the soul with their lush presentation is not a process that happens by accident. This needs the ear of a true musical soul, not just that but one who can translate those echoes of the mind into the real world, play the notes and arrange the combinations of melodic traction, tempo and feel into something that works on record and is primed to manipulate the audio reactions in the listener. This is a deep skill and from the moment you let the needle drop on this album, it is abundantly clear we are being driven by someone well versed and practised in the art of classic pop song craft. These may be lazy comparisons but think Beach Boys, early Bee Gees and Beatles (the three B’s) and that is the style Dent May is observing with a piece of work like this. The great news is, May is absolutely up to the task.
Of course, none of this has happened by accident. Dent May has been a long-term devotee of seventies singer-songwriters like the similarly Beatles influenced Harry Nilsson as well as Paul McCartney around the time of ‘Ram.’ It is only now though that he is really letting those influences bleed into his recorded output but because he does so without inhibition, they stand tall and proud. It is an interesting direction because for all the meticulousness in the production, not to mention the detail in the arrangements (there are guitar figures, piano sweeps and swooping emotive strings to be heard in abundance) the sessions that launched these tracks were actually quite loose and explorative. For Dent’s seventh full length release he abandoned his previous bedroom aesthetic in favour of collaborative jamming sessions with friends and colleagues, an idea designed to explore the potential for a fuller, tastier sound. It was recorded at the Los Angeles Honeymoon Suite studio with Paul Cherry producing. This freedom has opened the door for Dent to flex considerably his melancholy pop magic, the combination of the bitter and the sweet heard in these songs is surely enough to satisfy even the most discerning of pop classicist enthusiasts.
The willingness to capture spontaneity and true analogue feel is heard on a song like ‘Second Wind,’ a track recalling how a low feeling Dent was invited for a night out but, not feeling up for accepting, he waited until catching his second wind before choosing to take the social option against his natural instincts. The way it rises from pastoral acoustics to pounding piano keys and a skipping beat as the evening town is hit by the narrator before the tired yawns of the graceful closing section arrive, is a thing of genuine loveliness. Of the very Gerry Rafferty leaning title track, Dent acknowledges that it is the work of a man painfully aware of the natural disasters that could be coming our way, not to mention the ticking clock of mortality. This is no surprise to me, because the music plays like the work of someone urgently driven to locate the natural joy available to us in our brief window of existence. Aside from environmental concerns, he says of ‘The Big One’ that it is also about “any personal life-altering moment that shakes you out of your comfort zone.” This is the story across all eleven tracks here, the traumas and joys of day to day living wrapped in a masterclass of pop writing and recording, directed by a man prepared to walk the happy/sad line fearlessly, scooping up every drop of audio magic he finds on that path and heating it to perfection. Sometimes there is truly little to say about albums like this other than, it has been made with a purity of intent and vision which leaves us with an album that really needs proper listening and will frequently reward those who do.
Danny Neill
You can find the new Dent May album via this link: https://dentmay.bandcamp.com/
Fruit Tree Records 