One Eleven Heavy have been one thing of a transatlantic supergroup after they shaped a number of years in the past. James Jackson Toth – aka Wood Wand, the singer-songwriter behind quite a few “New Bizarre America” outfits like Dunza, Grim Jim, Hassara and James And The Giants – met Bradford-born musician Nick Mitchell Maiato at a Manchester gig in 2010 and immediately bonded over a shared love of Neil Younger, Little Feat and the Grateful Lifeless. After forming a band with assorted members of Royal Trux, Hiss Golden Messenger and Photo voltaic Motel Band, they began carrying these influences on their sleeve; the sort of connoisseurs who sonically curate half a century of leftfield Americana.
On Poolside, you’ll be able to hear shades of every little thing from Gram Parsons to Willie Nelson, from Michael Hurley to David Crosby, from the Allman Brothers to Santana, with nods to Led Zeppelin, Mike Cooper and the Unbelievable String Band for good measure. However that is additionally an album that buzzes with cultural references, each excessive and low. “You combined up Lee Majors with Mark E Smith once I mentioned that I preferred the Fall man” is a sometimes bathetic line, and there are dozens of comparable lyrics that namecheck every little thing from Twin Peaks to Grease, from “Chatanooga Choo Choo” to Little Home On The Prairie, from trashy cowboy flicks to darkish literary fiction.
The opening observe, “Tyrant King”, is outwardly impressed by Richard Brautigan’s 1974 novel The Hawkline Monster – a gothic western about two itinerant contract killers employed by a Native American prostitute to homicide a supernatural monster. The track manages to show this darkish supply materials into a chunk of joyous, freewheeling Southern rock: one the place machismo is a entrance for terrified, evasive males who’re perpetually on the run. It’s adopted by a really completely different sort of American gothic known as “Bama Yeti”, a cheery, upbeat, Creedence-style boogie impressed by a information story a few sighting of a sasquatch crossing the Florida/Alabama border.
The band’s sound has modified significantly in recent times. Their first two LPs – 2018’s All the pieces’s Higher and 2019’s Need Path – seemed like jam-band classes, recorded shortly within the temporary home windows of time that each one 5 band members may assemble in a single studio (Mitchell Maiato lives in Spain, Toth and the opposite band members lived in fully completely different elements of the US). However, beneath lockdown, they needed to discover new methods of working. Poolside was recorded remotely: Toth and Mitchell Maiato swapped audio recordings, sang harmonies on one another’s songs and enlisted Stephen Malkmus’ drummer Jake Morris.
These are extra structurally detailed and thoroughly thought of preparations, usually epic in scale. One spotlight is “Fruit Loops”, an episodic suite which begins as a swaggering 12/8 Southern rock shuffle, goes into an introspective Pink Floyd-ish breakdown and includes a Tropicalia-style interlude. Even the straight-up 12-bar blues exercises, like “Cici”, rework right into a hypnotic jabber of musique concrète. All through, Mitchell Maiato performs some splendidly untutored piano elements, usually sounding like a demented cat creeping alongside the keyboard.
Not all of the lyrics transfer into magical realist territory. “Billy” is a wonky piece of tribal glam rock the place Mitchell Maiato pays tribute to a pale native rock star whose profession has been a failure (“third on the invoice and over the hill”) however who stays a hero (“I needed to bend my knees to look you within the eye however I nonetheless seemed as much as you”). Two compositions are about recovering from horrific hangovers: “Rizzo In The Wig” seems to relate a drug-fuelled comedown in a suitably disjointed and funky 6/4 time signature (“I seemed on the clock it was 4:89/It was out of the bag, I used to be legally blind”); whereas “Plinth” is a chaotic piece of Southern soul a few couple who spend a whole relationship wallowing in limitless hangovers (“I bear in mind one time I recommended we fly to someplace sizzling in December/You mentioned ‘I’m not a goose’ and walked out of the home/And went off on a three-day bender”).
“Michael Landon” is a chunk of storytelling Dylanesque prose set to a tempo-defying piece of Dylanesque vocalese, that includes a violin solo from Sandy Lane, a few journey alongside a coastal mountain street. It was, apparently, impressed by a drive from Valencia to Benidorm, the place Mitchell Maiato witnessed the surreal sight of a bar filled with British expats watching an episode of the outdated western collection Bonanza on a giant display (“the projection of Michael Landon, who had no thought the place he was”). That is cosmic American music, however one with a way of distance and a world perspective.
