Morgan Delt: Phase Zero (CD on Sub Pop)

Band: Morgan Delt
Label: Sub Pop
Title: Phase Zero

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Band:Morgan Delt
Title:Phase Zero
Reviewed By:Adrian Janes
Date Published:08/11/2016

Label:Sub Pop
Format:CD
Release Year:2016
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Morgan Delt’s 2014 debut album was an extraordinary achievement, a sumptuous psychedelic stew that brimmed with imagination, made all the more amazing by the fact that, as musician, writer and producer, he was responsible for the whole thing. Despite gigging with a band in the interim, his second album is a similarly solo creation. If it doesn’t have quite the impact of its predecessor (what could?) there are both immediate pleasures and others, more subtle, which emerge from a seemingly sun-filled Californian air that initially obscures the shadows.

Thus the luxuriant atmosphere of ‘I Don’t Wanna See What’s Happening Outside’, despite its bright guitar motif and characteristically ethereal vocals, is undercut by jabs of synth and guitar. A concluding chant of “I don’t wanna know what’s happening” contends with a whistling crowd (perhaps from a rally in this year of fraught American politics?) and odd discordant notes. The song is interestingly ambiguous: despite the overall feel of a comforting blanket of sound, other elements undermine it, not least Delt’s vocal wish to deny what he sees. He is not ignorant, despite his efforts to create musical bliss.

With its similarly up-front title, ’The System of 1000 Lies’ is yet musically seductive: slow, mysterious, with a lambent keyboard phrase at its heart. Apart from titles, few of Delt’s lyrics are discernible, echoed and distorted as they are in various ways. So clues to any message must chiefly be sought in the music, as here where fat, deep synth notes spear the lightness of the voice and suggest an underlying foreboding.

Delt’s debut established him as inventively melodic, and ‘Another Person’, over strummed guitar and slightly skew-whiff synth, is one of many exquisite examples, his voice seeming to float like a cloud over a vast canyon. But as with many of the tracks, it also has a brief jarring coda which hints that all is not well.

‘Sun Powers’ is one of two solar songs, the other being closer ‘Some Sunsick Day’. ‘Powers’ is the much more energetic of the two, in fact one of the album’s liveliest, where ‘60's-style pop-rock drumming engagingly meets ringing guitar and sprays of synth. By the time of ‘Sunsick’, despite a sprightly synth line and some interesting effects, this energy (in ideas as well as in the playing) appears largely gone; the track’s fairly conventional guitar and repetitiveness only add to this impression, although the chant of “Sun/Sunsick day” does add some colour with its perverse echo of The Beatles’ ‘Here Comes the Sun’.

But before this point there are several other songs which are both subtle and striking. ‘The Age of the Birdman’ is introduced with agitated avian cries, before turning into a beautifully melancholy blend based around a gorgeous guitar phrase, fluid bass and busy but well-judged drums, then finishing with another swift mood-switch to piano and dark, lurching synth.

The initial pattering rhythm of ‘Mssr. Monster’, accompanied by high, agitated guitar and breathy vocals, moves back and forth with a low jangling guitar that’s matched by Delt singing unusually deep. At the end, the half-buried unease is brought to the surface from beneath a sea of echo in one clear word: “monsters”.

‘A Gun Appears’ is another stark title and a stark contrast with the music’s apparent mood. Finely delicate guitar and wistful vocals, beyond the intensely pretty melody, lament America’s violence: “That’s the way it’s always been/And that’s the way it’s gonna stay”.

Who Delt has in mind for ‘The Lowest of the Low’ isn’t clear. Maybe it’s even a mood of self-condemnation, but whatever or whoever the subject, it’s a beautiful piece of psychedelic electronica. Pulsing rhythm and moody drones deliver an atmosphere wherein his pure voice is embedded, like Brian Wilson guesting to fulfil Animal Collective’s ultimate wish.

With the implicit threat and fear that several of the titles convey, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Delt comes to seek an ‘Escape Capsule’. One of the longest tracks, at over five minutes (generally he’s a master of concision), the contrasting elements of ascending guitar, bongo-led rhythm and vocals that seem drawn from a dream are allowed the time to stretch out, achieving a mesmeric mood.

Echoes of early Pink Floyd, the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield are among the trace elements in ‘Phase Zero’, but turned to Delt’s own account by his musicianship and creative production. More widely, he continues the questioning of the sun-drenched Californian image that bands like Love, The Doors and Jefferson Airplane began in the Sixties, a questioning which both revelled in and revolted against it. In the end Morgan Delt sounds like no-one other than himself, an Icarus whose music soars towards the sun, yet also bears a burden of gravity.

Track Listing:

01) I Don't Wanna See What's Happening Outside
02) The System of 1000 Lies
03) Another Person
04) Sun Powers
05) The Age of the Birdman
06) Mssr. Monster
07) A Gun Appears
08) The Lowest of the Low
09) Escape Capsule
10) Some Sunsick Day

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Related Links

http://morgandelt.com/
https://morgandelt.bandcamp.com/
https://twitter.com/morgandelt
https://www.facebook.com/morgandeltmusic

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