Richard Swift - The (retro-pop) Novelist

Looking at him today it seems impossible, but Richard Swift wasn't always the free agent we know, one of the most interesting new names in American singer-songwriter music. About fifteen years ago, just before his acclaimed indie debut, the eccentric multi-instrumentalist Ricardo Sigilfredo Olivarez Swift-Ochoa was in fact finishing his apprenticeship among the unlikely ranks of Christian rock. Rather thin, hair cropped very short, no trace of a beard or goatee. A different person, and in fact an altogether different musician, still naively bound to a trite and far from daring formula, the same stale air he had breathed since childhood performing in this or that church in rural Utah or his native Minnesota. At the time he was still performing as Dicky Ochoa, the same pseudonym under which he released his first, eponymous album in 2000, apparently commissioned by a pastor and recorded as best he could on his four-track cassette recorder, just to pay the bills and fund his amateur filmmaking hobby. A similar one soon followed, credited to the moniker Company. The surname he used was still his father's, of Mexican origin, but when he set out on his true solo project, Richard chose to set it aside and embrace only his mother's lineage, in tribute to his grandfather Clifford Swift, whom he described as a sensational pianist.

Of that distant and in many ways cumbersome past, there's now practically no trace left. Richard Swift seems to appear almost out of nowhere after moving to Southern California in 2001: he has a black shock of hair, a thin moustache, and isn't particularly lanky. His style, too, doesn't go unnoticed, thanks to a lively, omnivorous talent for recovering traditions that are often worlds apart (folk, soul, pop, blues, vaudeville, ragtime, lo-fi electronics) yet rooted fairly deeply in the heart of American popular music.

The ballad of Ricardo Sigilfredo Olivarez

Only a few months have passed since he landed in California, and Richard already has an album of his own under his belt. Recorded by Chris Colbert, Walking Without Effort is first released that very same year through a small local label, Spunk, essentially without any distribution or visibility whatsoever. Swift stages himself and his enchanted world here, a timeless elsewhere that feels less like a simple aesthetic dwelling and more like a genuine spiritual refuge, a boundless comfort zone meant to shield the artist from the prevailing vulgarity of fashionable musical formulas he could never identify with. After the brief introductory theme, the young songwriter's debut kicks off with a pleasantly sparkling tone, a seductive night-time outfit as the ideal frame for his nostalgic yet never mawkish crooning ("Half Lit"). With "In The Air", the first occasional horns, warm but never gaudy, accompany this impressionist of song through his intimate explorations, somewhere between the hushed wonder of a Harry Nilsson à-la mode and a disenchantment already proverbial in its restraint. The guitar, though entirely marginal, carves out a leading role in "As I Go", one of his gentle, low-lit ballads, free of additives or sweeteners and unfailingly caressing.

Tracks like "Mexico (1977)" flow at a slow pace, a quiet, swaying gait, but at the same time reveal a self-assurance that is genuinely admirable for a debut artist. The taste, restraint and capacity to surprise are already there; what's perhaps still missing is the pop explosiveness Swift would later unleash, as here he still favours placid digressions, sepia or watercolour tones, barely sketched chiaroscuro, without overdoing the easy contrasts. In pieces like "Losing Sleep", however, one can still grasp the greatness of a superb performer and arranger, refined without ever sounding phoney. Though still limited in his range of shades, Richard betrays a formidable confidence and charms with the simplicity of his voice-and-piano pieces in the style of Van Dyke Parks, revivalist to the hilt yet incredibly of-the-moment. As if that weren't enough, there's the excellent closer "Beautifulheart": with its thoroughly clean sound, one senses without any doubt the potential of a towering songwriter, a master of a marbled yet glowing retro-pop, invariably languid and, when needed, piercing.

It really is a good album of songs, Walking Without Effort, with a tendentially understated profile and mood that give free rein to an indispensable introspective streak, but also a sufficiently luminous collection, with an implicit leaning toward easy-listening that makes it rather bewitching. The early Richard Swift, in short, has no trouble establishing himself as a genuine champion of understatement, an impression reinforced, if anything, by his second solo effort, The Novelist, shaped entirely on his own between 2002 and 2003, an intense period that saw the musician busy in the studio and on tour (on backing vocals and keyboards) with the shoegaze bands Starflyer 59 and Pony Express. Pressed by the equally shoestring label Velvet Blue in a limited number of copies, mostly sold or given away at his frequent Los Angeles shows, the record remained, for at least a couple of years, a further pleasure reserved for a close few.

One need only get past another brisk new intro to find Richard again, partly concealed by lo-fi production and the faint flourishes of a threadbare electronic palette. The dated sonics are the same as on the previous effort, but a new enchantment is already emerging, the one that would see him roam widely across revivalist territory in the years immediately following: smoky, dusty and enchanting, under the obvious dominion of his piano. This sophomore record indulges in a happy chaos and a penchant for vignette-sketching that our man would never entirely give up. The same goes for that brass-band flair in full alcoholic ecstasy — one third decadent New Orleans, one third sugary sunshine-pop, and for the rest a junk-shop attitude, that of a collector of relics from an American musical repertoire now fallen out of favour — all seasoned with an irrepressible playful streak, a taste for mixing things up, for high-low short circuits, for philatelist-songwriting eccentricities and the occasional smudge, incongruous perhaps but tasty ("Lovely Night").

With that never-disavowed weakness for twilight stylistic hypotheses, as elegant as they are démodé, the creations of the eccentric and brilliant Swift feel like forms of entertainment suddenly sprung from a dusty gramophone. In this, his songwriting remains frankly on the margins of any contemporary scene, proudly naive and out of place yet captivating with its somewhat worn-out melancholy, with that vintage grain worn like a defining garment rather than simply faked for the sake of cynical formal opportunism. The writing, moreover, remains effective and infectious, proof of a dandyism that never panders, far less naive and disarming than it would have you believe. Listening to The Novelist has the contours of a daydream, suspended as if inside a bubble, light and comforting thanks to gems like "I Should Have Been Home More" drowned in the amiably sprawling flow of an unbroken exercise in style, shaped more out of pleasure and even emotional affinity than out of any calculated expressive ambition.

Meanwhile, the young musician has no intention of boxing himself into a single stereotype, and he keeps busy in other artistic fields too. Ever since his teenage years he's never stopped tinkering in the visual arts, amassing an enormous body of experimental-flavored short films (in some ways akin to the works of Stan Brakhage). For a while he'd had in mind an ideal soundtrack for some of them, which took shape in 2005 with the release of a self-titled album credited to a new moniker, Instruments Of Science & Technology. Here his taste for abstraction comes to the fore, a kind of dust-mote visionary quality that, when paired with images, seems entirely fitting, in the manner of the post-avant-garde animations of latter-day Broadcast (later work, later still). There's no point - because it would be beside the point - looking for connections to work credited to Richard Swift, except for the long double EP he would release three years later under the alias Onasis. Recycled sci-fi suggestions, flashes of futuristic robotics, hallucinated Kraftwerk-like notions or hypnotic ambient textures ("Shooting A Rhino Between The Shoulders") inhabit an elusive, ghostly collection, often thick with unease ("Plan A & Plan B"). His is an electronic music that is at once cryptic and ethereal, closely tied to the hauntology phenomenon - an imaginative, dreamlike, unsettling and proudly anti-intellectual stream best appreciated as an extremist digression, a pastime with no particular artistic ambition, yet one the songwriter clearly feels deeply in his most disembodied, hazy and happily escapist incarnation (listen to the illuminating "Ghost Of Hip Hop").

The two short LPs, along with the handful of 7-inches and EPs that followed in quick succession, didn't go unnoticed. Secretly Canadian offered the singer, newly relocated to Oregon, his first real contract, and promoted his two semi-bootleg records in a combined compilation ("The Richard Swift Collection Vol. 1", 2005). The first collection of unreleased material put out by the Bloomington label, Richard's third album, arrived a couple of years later. It doesn't take many listens to realize that the author of this Dressed Up For The Letdown deserves a place among the great revelations of the new American singer-songwriter scene, as well as among the most convincing standard-bearers of an implicit reform movement in psych-pop that, since the early 2000s, has already brought to wider attention interesting names such as Kelley Stoltz, Lawrence Arabia and Jim Noir. Swift shows he's absorbed the lessons of many great masters, managing to sound classic while retaining his own genuine originality, never chasing the latest trends and instead reworking decades upon decades of popular musical culture in his own way.

Armed with a decidedly folk-flavored guitar and a Van Dyke Parks-style piano, across these ten splendid songs Richard makes no secret of his deep love for the late-Sixties California scene, nor for the flashes of the Beatles and Kinks from that same period, but he also makes no secret of wanting to tap into the now largely forgotten great tradition of Tin Pan Alley, the musical movement born in the late nineteenth century and marked by a light style that blended jazz, blues and ragtime elements to create danceable, commercial little tunes. Such a repertoire goes a long way toward enriching Swift's still thoroughly contemporary songwriting, amplifying its influences and loading it with musical and literary suggestions, evident both in his irrepressible taste for quotation and in the sarcastic, sharp-witted lyrics of these warm, vividly colored ballads. "The Songs Of National Freedom" recalls the more fragile side of Lennon, starting out as a little march with a frivolous piano but proving to be anything but a trifling ditty (as Richard's remarkably versatile voice also suggests), and by the end it even hints at puffs of minimal electronics à la Sparklehorse.

On the same wavelength is the terrific brass-band pop, in perfect Divine Comedy style, of "Kisses For The Misses", a little gem that sits somewhere between the Daviesian vaudeville of "Sitting By The Riverside" and early Rufus Wainwright, and even allows itself the luxury of quoting Nick Drake's "Fruit Tree". Speaking of Wainwright, it's impossible not to recognize in the melodic lines of "Buildings In America" the melancholy of a masterpiece like "Poses", not least because Swift's voice, though more nasal and less graceful, reveals a similarly evocative and captivating power. Worth noting is the Beatles-esque aftertaste that runs, in filigree, through virtually all of the album's compositions, with special mention for "P.S. It All Falls Down", so shamelessly beautiful and subtle that it almost feels like a caustic cover of one of the tracks from "Let It Be".

It's genuinely difficult to rank the songs on this record, since a consistently high quality is one of the hallmarks of Dressed Up For The Letdown. What's certain is that there isn't a single weak link or filler moment in the chain. Full marks go to the exemplary easy-listening of "Most Of What I Know", a deeply inspired ballad that naturally combines unease and enthusiasm, delivers a killer chorus, and in its closing moments makes room for horns, heightening the romantic emphasis without ever overdoing it. Swift's voice is especially appreciable on "Ballad Of You Know Who", duly supported by elegant piano and violins, dispensed in sweet laments so as to draw the listener into an irresistible emotional involvement. The following "The Million Dollar Baby" (curious, the nod to Clint Eastwood's film of the same name) produces that same spellbinding effect, with a guitar taking center stage, starting out velvety and growing gradually more piercing (though never excessively so), letting a very human sense of despair shine through.

The pace is relaxed and not prone to excess, but in a couple of moments Swift manages to reach maximum intensity by going very slow: it happens at the opening with the title track, where the acoustic march of light horns and handclapping carries an unmistakable Mexican flavor, like a mule-back excursion, and it happens again with the poetic close of "Opening Band". This is one of those cases where Richard's genius expresses itself with maximum power in fragmentary form (much as Badly Drawn Boy has often managed, to name a familiar example), which also happens on another gem, "Artist & Repertoire". Both the fade-out and the metaphor of "Joan The Baptist/Opening Band" are splendid in the first, while the second shows exemplary introspective skill and disenchantment - an indirect attack on the music business, played entirely along the razor's edge of bitter irony.

An oceanic extravagance

Dressed Up For The Letdown is a revelation, allowing the American songwriter to step out of anonymity and earn himself national - and not just national - visibility, soon boosted by the American and European tours that followed (both solo and opening for Stereolab). But the record also serves as a proving ground for the recording studio Richard had opened in Oregon, National Freedom, as well as for his ambitions as a producer. During an appearance as a guest on the BBC show "Later... with Jools Holland", Swift was approached by an enthusiastic Pat Sansone, guitarist for Wilco and Autumn Defense, who introduced him to Jeff Tweedy. Tweedy offered to record his next effort directly in his Chicago loft and invited him to open for Wilco on the "Sky Blue Sky" tour. Before enjoying a level of resources previously unthinkable for him, our man still found time to release, again through Secretly Canadian, a twenty-track double EP titled Richard Swift As Onasis, presented to the press with a curt tagline: "Music to dance drunk to".

His penchant for the fragmentary reaches its peak in a ramshackle, playful, raucous release, on which Swift has fun playing the part of noise-making explorer. It's an amiably sprawling little work, a celebration of approximation that has made an aesthetic manifesto out of the marginal, but also a systematic act of sabotage, a deconstruction of song-form in pursuit of impressions - rigorously shaky, blurry, flickering snapshots - with the singer almost always off-camera or disguised in grotesque, garish costumes, as happens on "The German (Something Came Up)". With its spontaneous, irritating down-and-out blues digressions, openly flagged in the titles - "Vandervelde Blues", "Greaseball Blues", "Knee-High Boogie Blues" - or otherwise, it's entertaining enough even while remaining a trifling, patchy record, deliberately elusive almost out of necessity: a torrential, ineffable divertissement, a good showcase of creative vitality, but one to be understood strictly as a side note.

The Onasis evoked in the title is a sly hoarder of musical frivolities ("Sign Language", which even recalls the amateurish Vic Chesnutt of similar trash experiments), a collector of dust-mote suggestions who toys with every sort of formal device or sound, from transfigured vintage to Dada minimalism, from lo-fi bric-a-brac to ultra-reverbed miniaturism, with an eccentric taste that only rarely tips over into the brazen sadism of other, far less respectful colleagues when it comes to good form. Besides the vocals, the piano is the other great absence, replaced by dusty little organs and synths, surplus items from a bygone modernity now destined for the scrap heap, and on the rare occasions it does appear, it's only in the guise of a gatecrasher unable to properly entertain its meager audience. As far as the ear can hear there's room for discarded sketches: sometimes ecstatic despite their gloom ("Field Painting"), sometimes simply outlandish, in other cases boldly leaning into rock primitivism ("Your Mom") or garage-pop stylization in the manner of the holiday-mode Dirtbombs of "Ooey Gooey Chewy Ka-blooey!" ("Phone Coffins"), when not lost in an alienated kitsch jumble ("JLH").

There are frequent winks to the most trivial, inconclusive side of Lennon ("Whistle At The Bottom Of A Shoe"), overdoing the throwaway noise a touch. Which is exactly why that disreputable, slappable mug the Oregon songwriter flaunts, complete with fake bruises, fits so perfectly on the cover image. It's a mask that lasts only l'espace d'un matin, though, soon replaced by the more cryptic one of another EP, Ground Trouble Jaw, a sumptuous preview of the effort to come.

In all, there are five new tracks, three of which ("Lady Luck", "A Song For Milton Feher" and "The Original Thought") would also show up proudly on the forthcoming fourth album. The other two are the transfigured doo-wop gem "Would You?", a display of revivalist romanticism that has nothing to envy in filologically minded acts like Reigning Sound, King Khan & BBQ Show or Shannon & The Clams, and the equally terrific joke of "The Bully", halfway between vicious, mold-flecked funk-soul and musicalized Motown spoken word. The reference to Milton Feher is a curious one: he's the little-known author of a 1962 spoken-word record, "Relaxing Body And Mind". One of its tracks was titled "Walking Without Effort", a coincidence for the songwriter, who at the time of his own self-titled debut had never heard of that elderly performer, but who later wanted to meet him and spent half a day recording with him, in order to get his voice onto the first Instruments Of Science & Technology collection.

Meanwhile, the time for the new album has come. Recorded in cahoots with Chris Colbert (the trusted sound engineer for the Walkmen), with the assistance of multi-instrumentalist Casey Foubert (previously with Sufjan Stevens and Pedro The Lion) and a quartet of star guests, Ryan Adams, Mark Ronson, Sean Lennon and Pat Sansone, The Atlantic Ocean is a record that throws you off balance.

A lover of detail and irony, Swift hides important clues in the album's surreal cover art. Scattered on the shelf next to the turntable, you can easily make out the LPs of "Bringing It All Back Home", "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band" and "Dirty Mind". These are carefully chosen titles, nothing accidental about them, essential references for interpreting the Oregon-based singer's latest sonic about-face: if Dylan is chosen as a symbol of his songwriting calling and Lennon confirms his incurable flair for fantasy, Prince's first masterpiece becomes a precious tool for explaining this bizarre change of musical clothing. The stylistic revolution hits the listener head-on with the eye-popping glam-pop of the title track, a vividly colored opening number with a bouncing gait, full of synthetic swells, reverb, gaudy sleigh bells and marvelously orchestrated backing choirs, whose lyrics allow themselves the luxury of quoting Blondie and late-period Lou Reed. Reinforcing these visual hints, the author often describes the new record in interviews with a colorful little formula: "Prince sitting in on John Lennon's Plastic Ono sessions". A sharp eye will also have no trouble spotting, in the cover collage, the same mountain that framed Richard on Dressed Up For The Letdown. This too is a clear warning: beneath the excesses of the costume, the songwriting hasn't changed.

Confirmation of this comes from the pivotal role of the piano, fully in Van Dyke Parks style, a true signature sound for Swift. On "R.I.P.", for instance, its rhythmic and melodic prominence is so marked that it lingers in the memory, a sign of an authorial vein perfectly at ease even with pop-leaning lightness. It's a partial return to the previous record, resolving into a kind of march that reeks of New Orleans and cleverly avoids the risk of tipping into mannered sentimentality. And it's again a sparkling little march that sets the pace of "A Song For Milton Feher", alternating splashes of vintage electronics and plenty of synth-pop with melancholy clearings that slowly dissolve into the fading refrain. Even more than in the past, the songwriter repeatedly opts for surprise, disorienting the listener with a pile-up of contrary musical choices and assorted eccentricities: it happens with the impeccable parade of "Ballad Of Old What's His Name", a sudden shift of moods (from enchantment to grit to farcical celebration), with the minimal folk streaks and immaculately calibrated easy-listening of "The First Time", but also with the vaudeville, operetta and circus-festival tones that run through the horn-laced, fantastically decorated "Bat Coma Motown". The results, overstuffed yet brilliant, prove the singer right. Swift juggles his little tunes with ease, every song readily lodges itself in your head after a couple of listens, and one can only marvel at how this creative mechanism runs like a Swiss watch, absorbing every kind of stylistic manipulation or quotation without missing a beat.

The Atlantic Ocean is a crazy but absolutely successful album. It plays the card of disorientation without any fear, but does so with taste, with ironic finesse, with a simply marvelous revivalist bluff. His songs are direct pop tunes, instantly gratifying, genetically modified by folk, soul and certain Eighties sounds that today tend to be read as trash but that Swift proves he loves madly. His playful spirit emerges in all its exuberance on the lively "Hallelujah, Goodnight!", amid a forest of puffing accordions that baroque-ify the delightful chorus without cracking the underlying simplicity of a song that is nonetheless very sweet, even with a few too many kitsch smudges. Like it or not, Richard Swift confirms himself as a thoroughbred songwriter who knows how to contain his own effervescence before it becomes hard to manage or tolerate. One of the virtues of such an extravagant (and therefore not easy) album lies precisely in respecting certain limits, those that separate refinement and style from excess for its own sake.

It's impossible not to forgive the singer for betraying the delicate authorial promise suggested in the incipit of "The Original Thought", given that the all-sequins pop masquerade that follows is nonetheless a gem, festive and melancholic at once, lovable too thanks to its skids and grotesque colorings. With "The End Of An Age" Swift fully shows his two-faced nature, that of a mature, moody tumbler, shedding the guise of the frivolous entertainer to take on that of the sophisticated, impeccably controlled crooner: with brazen ease his piano shifts from brightness to tears in a flash. Even on a perhaps less successful episode like "Already Gone" he needs the full extent of his crowd-pleasing talent to earn applause: beyond the theatricality and the vaguely mannered nostalgic cut, Richard works on autopilot and replicates certain of his standards (and the lovely Beatlesque tonality) with committed dedication. In the dark, inexorable finale of "Lady Luck", with a lunar beat ideal for his vocal forays and winking at Motown, he allows himself the luxury of unleashing his best falsetto ever: a stunning tour de force and a perfect coda for yet another well-judged album.

2010 is a year of significant diversions for Swift. To begin with, with Music For Paradise Armor he replicates, without much excitement, the experience of his side project Instruments Of Science And Technology. The new collection carries on the discourse opened five years earlier without substantial variations to the formula, except for an inflated reliance on a kind of electronic pointillism, a deconstructive logic that ends up getting lost in a dusty transposition of sonic hypotheses now invertebrate, tattered ("Dancecontestwinner", now become Swift's preferred moniker on social media) which effectively cancel out much of the appeal of the previous release ("Mt. Mountain", "Clkclk"). The result is a scrambled, thoroughly flickering library music, with flashes of extemporaneous psychedelia, tormented field recording notes, frantic ambient transfigurations, varied nightmares of noise-minimalism and aerophones like sick lungs, ready for the scrapheap ("Lungs"). Synthetic filth has taken over, infecting every lasting impression to give shape to an obsessive, recurring sonic paranoia ("Old Hanshakes").

Far more interesting is instead the album the songwriter makes together with his friend Damien Jurado, for whom he had recently served as producer on the well-received "Saint Bartlett". Recorded between the kitchen and dining room of Richard's house over a weekend in late August 2010, with an old four-track cassette recorder and a 1950s ribbon microphone, Other People's Songs Volume One is a collection of the most varied covers, from Bill Fay to Yes and from John Denver to Kraftwerk.

From the very first note the production reveals itself as spare, the approach lofty but dusty, echoing Brian Wilson albeit in a version so austere (and at times grayish) that disorientation is inevitable. Damien carves out for himself a restrained but central role at the start, while Richard amuses himself playing the part of the penniless producer who is nonetheless anything but short on invention. Already with "Hello Sunshine", by the obscure west-coast outfit Relatively Clean Rivers, the roles reverse and we move into a vintage technicolor too, amid soft folk arpeggios (recorded in ten minutes by the only guest, guitarist Josh Ottum), gentle horns and a reaffirmed, almost gospel choral stamp. The tone is relaxed but bright enough, and leads straight back to 1960s Greenwich Village, to a placid, optimistic singer-songwriter tradition. As can be gathered from the coordinated falsetto of a far less obscure "Sweetness", what is being sketched out is in fact another journey backward into a tightly circumscribed musical mythology. It's a refined and inevitably niche undertaking, but one that can be called substantially successful, thanks to the versatility of the two performers and the technical talent of a Richard who, first and foremost, confirms himself as an excellent philologist, truly skilled at celebrating the classic marriage of figs and walnuts.

Swift shows himself perfectly at ease with the languid inflections of a singer-songwriter style inclined toward romanticism and blessed with formidable melodic nuances. Of course, the updating of these formulas stops at ground zero, since neither man intends to overturn their original groove and suggestions, so it feels as if we're in the presence of old classics forgotten for decades in a trunk, as if we've entered a suspended bubble, frozen in an elegant, unrepeatable past that for the pair coincides with an ideal comfort zone, emotional too, and manages to give off a magic that is at times irresistible. The golden rule of alternation adds a touch of liveliness to the record, shifting the balance back and forth from one side to the other, but always only in the details. The affinity between the two artists, the expressive union of intent, is such that it makes the album truly coherent right to the end, with "Follow Me" and "If The Sun Stops Shinin'" as absolute standout numbers. "Outside My Window", a conversely more unadorned episode, nonetheless proves capable of an intriguing emotional glow, so the two men's fruitful minimalism emerges reinvigorated from a hushed performance that is anything but cold or raw.

Swift's piano treats itself to a cameo right in "Crazy Like A Fox", though his turn as singer marks a double relinquishment right in the closing bars. The honor thus falls to Jurado also on "Radioactivity", the album's true surprise, with its kraut-rock weave extracted from its electronic context and recoded onto the frequency of Lee Hazlewood's saccharine underground, releasing a freshness as novel as it is radiant.

Other People's Songs Volume One implicitly promises a sequel just around the corner that, however, inexplicably, will never materialize. It is also released only as a free download online. The links are removed fairly soon, so the collection remains impossible to find until 2015, the year of its most welcome physical release.

In the five-year gap, Swift increasingly establishes himself as a sought-after producer, lending the services of his National Freedom studio, besides the usual Jurado, to the likes of Laetitia Sadier, Mynabirds, Gardens & Villa, Tahiti 80, Tennis, Foxygen, Guster and Shins. Not content with that, he even joins James Mercer's band as keyboardist (and backing vocalist).

Rounding off a highly prolific phase, in October 2011, again on Secretly Canadian, comes a new EP entirely helmed by Richard, Walt Wolfman. It brings back, in every respect, the elegant Swift who deals in disgraced musical sensations, the languid priest of revivalism with a license as an undercover primitivist and a permit for sabotage: a decent pleasure despite the marginal nature of an undertaking that betrays all its own irony right from the Tarantino-esque coda of "MG 333". The songwriter's research proceeds impassively through sweetly disturbed territory, open to an intoxicating contamination ranging from R&B swells to the sirens of a rigorously overexposed soul, all hypotheses of a retro-mania gone as mad as mayonnaise and crashed like an unwelcome stowaway in the present day. With superlative consistency, our man persists with a softly reverberated garage-revival schematism, when needed exalted in a romantic key by a falsetto à la Lawrence Arabia ("Laugh It Up"), another inconsolable orphan of Harry Nilsson, not by chance. The result is an invariably dirty, worn-out and alluring sound that finds its estranging apotheosis in the paradigmatic inflections of "Zombie Boogie", another passage that reveals more than a spiritual affinity with the incurable retro-infection of Shannon Shaw and Cody Blanchard (with perhaps less of a penchant for caricature), or with a Mark Sultan.

As the minutes pass, the lo-fi quality rises like a black tide over the rock cliff, fouling every prospect with a barely contained proto-punk ferocity. A werewolf-like, venomous animation that, net of the pop modulations absent here, will show more than one analogy with the sensational sophomore album of King Tuff. The gallery of monsters is completed by the hallucinated surf of "Drakula (Hey Man)", almost an affectionate tribute to the gospel alienations and sublime preacherly trash of the latest Svenonius-esque incarnation, that of the freak crew Chain & The Gang.

Even the farewell of "St. Michael" doesn't deny the guiding lines of a tasty beat mystification, one destined, moreover, to leave no significant traces in the work of an artist henceforth inclined to hide among the second lines, to exquisitely technical manual labor, to a supporting role that ultimately feels like a self-imposed exile for a voice so original and endearingly outside the norm. Richard will not release anything else under his own name, as Instruments Of Science And Technology, or in cahoots with his buddy Jurado. Instead, he will intensify his work as a producer or his forays as a sideman: the beating heart of Nathaniel Rateliff's R&B backing band, the Night Sweats, touring bassist for the Black Keys, and Dan Auerbach's partner in a new recording venture, The Arcs.

All praiseworthy endeavors, but not enough to offset the withdrawal from the spotlight of Swift the songwriter and performer, a choice that is regrettable. The hope of hearing him again as an undisputed protagonist did not seem destined to fade into a slow dissolve, but it is shattered on July 3, 2018, by the sudden announcement of his death in Tacoma, due to liver and kidney failure caused by the severe alcohol dependency that the singer (who also lacked health insurance) had suffered from for some time. Richard Swift thus exits the stage at just forty-one years old, leaving behind a wife and three children.

It is at least a small consolation to learn, announced shortly afterward by his label, that he had nonetheless kept one last surprise in store for fans. Absent from the recording scene since 2009 — aside from short releases or the collaboration with Jurado — he had never really stopped writing new songs. The awareness of his approaching end, with his health disasters already evident and hospital stays multiplying, pushed him in his final months to focus his efforts on completing one more collection that, as stated on the Secretly Canadian website, had become his personal "white whale". The Hex is an album that is quite painful to approach, and not only because it represents the final legacy of a talented artist, but rather because of the affliction that, though masterfully concealed, inhabits every groove of it. One of the lighter moments, "Broken Finger Blues", recalls the sense of anguished suspension that accompanied the songwriter when, in 2010, he badly fractured the ring finger of his left hand and for several months did not know whether he would be able to keep playing guitar and piano as before. Despite the despair, the tone comes across as ecstatic, jubilant, and the solo placed at the end stands as the best possible exorcism. Not all the stories told here, however, have a happy ending, and melancholy pervades the listening experience like the curse hinted at in the title. Don't be fooled by the lively Tin Pan Alley juggling of "Dirty Jim", a very clear re-immersion into the dazzling antiquarianism of the unforgettable Dressed Up For The Letdown: it's a song about addiction, and it tells it with all the desperation the subject demands.

An album with an undeniably heavy heart, then, but one that for Richard must also have had a deep cathartic value. This explains the triptych dedicated to the loss of loved ones: from his mother Wendy, portrayed with that headlong, curious, eclectic and well-meaningly scattered spirit (which somewhat represents the quintessence of our man's slippery yet utterly personal art), to his friend Nancy, evoked through a sublime Bowie-esque distortion, through to the slower, more touching elegy in memory of his sister. At times emphatic with all its raw falsettos, always deeply intimate, The Hex is perhaps Swift's work most steeped in lyricism, a collection of farewell songs (one for all, the bittersweet "Hzlwd", for which he truly couldn't find the words) wrapped in a saturated sound, only barely roughened up, anything but clean, evidently judged the most fitting way to convey that sense of absolute precariousness, or of joyful condemnation, with which he loved to depict existence (even in that sort of obsessive litany that is "Babylon").

From the looming seventies theatricality of "Selfishmath", a new variation on his lunar, mutant soul, to the dusty, visionary dirge that opens the record by setting aside the brash pop experimentalism of Atlantic Ocean in favor of yet another foray into the lean singer-songwriter mode of his early albums, not forgetting the freak-out detour of "Kensington!", attuned to the frayed (yet by no means compromise-prone) EPs of his late output - this also stands as an excellent compendium of his unmistakable art. "Sept20", his very last written song, once again echoes, alongside "Ballad Of You Who", the nihilistic sunsets of Dressed Up For The Letdown, and comes along with flawless timing to close a circle that, sadly for us, will offer no further encores.

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