Dave Willey and friends Immeasurable Currents

Dave Willey and friends
Immeasurable Currents
AltOrock

Gathering a group of talented friends together to score his late father’s poetry to a variety of musical settings will understandably have been a cathartic act of homage and remembrance for multi-instrumentalist Dave Willey. Yet the results lack any mawkish, cloying sentimentality or indulgence. 
Sometimes reminiscent of Art Bears’ spiky classicism and the wry humour ingrained into the Greaves/Blegvad Kew Rhone collaboration, each of the twelve songs is filled with intriguing ideas, surprising turns of mood and frequently dazzling bursts of muscular playing.

The contrast between the hurtling, breakneck velocity of I Could Eat You Up - thrillingly underpinned by Dave Kerman’s brisk drumming - and the folky naiveté of What A Night, couldn’t be greater. Yet there’s a unity of character and purpose that binds all of these tracks together regardless.

With some winning contributions from Hughscore’s Elaine di Falco, Deborah Perry’s languid, slightly deadpan vocals also captures one’s attention, conveying the words with a faithful clarity, that enables meaning and imagery to interact with the music without ever being overwhelmed by it.

The sepulchral menace of Hugh Hopper’s barbed-wire bass fuzz tones mutating beneath spiraling voices during Nightfall provides this record with a ravishing, genuinely powerful coda.