American ex-pat Bob Drake is an avant-prog veteran toiling alone in the French countryside; not surprisingly, his records are mostly slept-on and unheard. It's a shame, though, considering how he fits with recent trends in experimental pop. If the music scene were a corporation, Drake would sit just a couple doors down the hall from acid-folk and whatever you call the stuff Fiery Furnaces play. He'd be in the office reserved for the guy who's been there longer than most of upper management, but who isn't particularly interested in climbing the company ladder. Some people, when given the space and time to explore the inner workings of the firm, ultimately just want to do the work; they avoid social obligations that may well assist their profile on the grounds that they might also hinder their focus.
If that makes Drake the Milton of the indie experimental Office Space-- his desk dense with both modern and archaic recording equipment, photographs of decrepit wooden sheds, a banjo and a bear suit-- it hardly makes his own work ordinary. Drake's music, taken as a whole, is unlike anything I've come across: a joyous, macabre hybrid of Song Cycle, Rubber Soul, Close to the Edge, and the sounds of Appalachian fingers on strings and mice scattering under your floorboards. The music has a few notable siblings but is married to no one, and it's hard to imagine if you haven't actually heard the stuff.
Drake self-released his first solo record in 1994; at the time, it mostly fell on deaf ears, but now it's been reissued by the U.S. branch of out-rock fountainhead ReR. What Day Is It? is not only Drake's most song-oriented release, it's also arguably his best, rivaled only by 2002's very different The Skull Mailbox. The basic sound will be familiar to fans; Drake's distinctive synthesis-- American folk and progressive rock, mixed with music that defies categorization-- hasn't changed. The songs are strikingly different in that, well, they're "songs"-- verses, choruses, even "hooks," idiosyncratic as they are. It's funny to see how Drake's stuff has sidestepped these notions over the years, but for beginners, I can't imagine a better gateway to his work.
Opener "The House" begins with dissonant, mysterious strummed chords from an acoustic guitar; the chiming of an electric guitar melody on the left and Drake's admission that "I heard a sound, a scuttling sound / It could be a mouse, but I don't think so" represent well the kind of black comedy/paranoid horror imagery Drake prefers. "The Drawing", likewise, begins with the statement: "You always start first with my eyes, except when you're serious, then it's my ears". The music is a rustic mix of Beatlesque melody and country-blues, but when the "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" riffery begins, the song goes from sly joke to epic jam. Seriously, I've already gotten a note from the neighbors over this one.
And speaking of jams, the machine-gun rhythm that launches "Plates" should sate the avant-rock crowd, just as the instrumentals "Weeds" and "Spiders" will answer the burning question: Is there a way to turn a hoedown into a prog-down? Despite the genre leaps, Drake isn't really showing off; he sounds like he's having fun, even with the many hundreds of notes that pass by in a typical song. Tracks like the buoyant "The 13th Animal" or the mystical, quasi-psychedelic "Precarious Glimmering" are unselfconscious and effortlessly motive, where almost anyone else would sound heavy-handed trying to pull them off. Again, if you haven't heard Bob Drake and aren't already put off by the references, What Day Is It? is a perfect primer. There really isn't anything else like it.
