Dan Melchior
Home of the Blues
LP
Kye
2016
How’s it that there ain’t nary a consonant nor vowel on the Internet about this release? I usually dig about beforehand, just seein whether I’m missing some key element or background info; investigate what the Greek choruses are hollerin back and what have you. Not a peep. What happened? Was everybody too gummed up in the sticky nightmare of last year to notice?
Shame, that, cuz Dan’s Ohio Period (or should I call it The Gray Period?) produced some fine records. Home of the Blues prolly ain’t a “fan-shedder” like Excerpts and Half-Speeds, his last outing on Kye, but it’s just as deep a dunk in the man’s dome pool. I don’t mean just in terms of the inner workings of his craft but his literal interiors. The bod and the abode. Shit, that’s where the blues lives anyhoo. Whatever ain’t guitar, tape or prerecorded music here seems to be bodily or domestic: claps, slaps, close-mic’d mouths, kitchen scrubbins, wood planks, scissors. Hell, the lyrics to “Mouse Stash” are quite literally soaked with malfunctioning bodies and parts thereof. Whether this was a theme in the “series of exercises” he was given to make this record, or he was dropped like a newbie soldier into the wilds of Dayton with nothing but his skivvies and a crumpled picture of Elmore James, I have no earthly notion. But damn do the shoe fit. There is also an overwhelming loneliness and isolation at work here; a man penned in and making do; snappin bits off the brittle edge of the day and tryin to have a laugh with them. Or at them. (But never at us. That’s one of Dan’s gifts: he never sics the shadows on us.) Don’t get much more relevant than that.
Ok fine: Index and Anton Heyboer meet in Ivor Cutler’s Scotch sitting room. There. I did my arcane music mathematics. Happy now? Zat make you wanna hear this? Great. And hey it’s still around! With a poster! Hurrah and hurray and hurry whydontcha?
Now back to yer regularly scheduled tepidity.
-Wren Nigel Reath
