Mojave 3 - Prayers for a Ray of Sunshine

The recent rediscovery of shoegaze by a new generation of critics and rock music fans has brought renewed, widespread acclaim to the achievements of Slowdive, the extraordinary English band who, between the late Eighties and early Nineties, recorded three albums now unanimously regarded as absolute masterpieces of the genre. Less well known is the story of what happened when Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell, the two founding members of Slowdive, decided to unplug their amps and abandon the feedback and walls of distorted guitars typical of shoegaze in favor of gentler, acoustic atmospheres. The name of that story is Mojave 3.

The first work by Halstead & Goswell's new band, alongside drummer Ian McCutcheon (already in Slowdive for "Pygmalion"), co-produced by the band with Paul Tipler, came out in 1996 on 4AD (as would all their subsequent releases) and is a genuinely strange, out-of-time object in a transitional period when the English music scene was dominated by Britpop and the new synthetic, danceable sounds of trip-hop, jungle and drum 'n' bass. In this context, Ask Me Tomorrow, Mojave 3's debut album, passed largely under the radar, catching the attention of only a handful of listeners immediately won over by the rarefied, intimate sounds of a beautiful, far from easy record, a timeless object that, one could sense right away, would herald some very interesting developments.

Mojave 3's debut, all things considered, isn't that far removed from Slowdive's music: sure, the distorted guitars and the electricity typical of shoegaze are gone, but the atmospheres and overall mood remain unchanged from the previous band, and the vocal interplay between Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell still clearly recalls the Slowdive adventure.

The album opens in immediately striking fashion with the enveloping, delicate narcolepsy of "Love Songs On the Radio", the band's very first single, sung by Rachel Goswell and clearly indebted to the lessons of Cowboy Junkies and Mazzy Star. The rest of the album maintains an excellent standard, alternating songs performed by Goswell alone with tracks sung as duets with her partner Neil Halstead: particularly worth noting are the aching, intimate "Tomorrow's Taken", which tackles the classic theme of sorrow drowned in drink, and the more melodic, cathartic "Candle Song 3". The album's other masterpiece is undoubtedly the closing "Mercy", sung as a duet and marked by an almost epic momentum and a decidedly more electric attack than the rest of the record.

All things considered, Ask Me Tomorrow is an introverted, languid album, with several points of contact with the Canadian Cowboy Junkies' "Trinity Sessions" and with an alt-country sound more American than English in flavor. The melodies emerge only sparingly, as if smothered in a kind of moving artistic introversion, yet Mojave 3's debut stands out for its delicate rarefaction and hints at exciting developments to come.

Developments that duly arrive with the second album recorded by Halstead and co.: Out Of Tune (1998) completes Mojave 3's artistic maturation toward an indie-pop that remains bittersweet and melancholic, but is decidedly sunnier and at times even cheerful. The substantial differences are visible right from the cover: where Ask Me Tomorrow featured an abstract, rather gloomy graphic, Out Of Tune is dominated by an overexposed backlit shot of some surfers on a near-deserted cliff, a striking image that is almost dazzling, speaking of light and of afternoons spent in the sun watching the sea and idly reflecting on one's own life.

The band's music seems to have freed itself from the introverted gloom of the debut to soar toward a delicate, perfectly realized song form. The manifesto of the new direction taken by Neil Halstead and co. is probably the opening track of the record, the splendid "Who Do You Love", a sunny, thoroughly enjoyable song that instantly shatters the memory of Ask Me Tomorrow's gloom and propels the band toward a far sunnier dimension. Also remarkable are the second and third tracks, "Give What You Take" and "Some Kinda Angel", whose vocal interplay and relaxed melodies (not without a touch of delicate melancholy) seem to openly reference the West Coast sound of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

The rest of the album is highly enjoyable but decidedly more "ordinary", and probably fails to match the heights reached by the opening trio of aces. The band's line-up had changed since the debut: alongside the usual Halstead, Goswell and McCutcheon, the group now included guitarist Simon Rowe (who had already appeared on some tracks of the debut) and keyboardist Alan Forrester (who replaced Christopher Andrews). It is precisely the arrival of Forrester's Hammond organ, with its lively, sunny melodies, that may be one of the keys to explaining the evolution of the band's sound. Forrester, incidentally, also proved adept with a camera, having taken the beautiful photograph on the album's cover.

The only downside of Out Of Tune lies in the fact that Rachel Goswell sees her prominent role within the band decidedly diminished, with her already soft and delicate voice reduced to essentially backing-vocal duties, while Neil Halstead's centrality grows exponentially. The album is produced by the band with the collaboration of Mark Van Hoen, who would also work on subsequent Mojave 3 releases, both as producer and as "additional musician", effectively becoming an added member of the group.

After Out Of Tune, you could say the masterpiece is "in the air", and sure enough it arrives with their third album, dated 2000. Excuses For Travellers is the classic "perfect record", a jewel of grace, restraint and elegance. By now the shoegaze years are light years away: this new Mojave 3 collection is a wonderful treasure chest of crystalline indie-pop, with some songs of such simple, sublime beauty that they wouldn't have looked out of place in the repertoire of Nick Drake. The whole tracklist deserves applause: from the reflective sweetness of "In Love With A View" to the quiet, delicate melancholy of "Trying To Reach You", from the introverted, bitter musings of the nearly seven-minute-long "Life In Art" to the ironic brightness of the amusing and amused "Return To Sender", from the almost solemn pace of the touching "When You're Drifting" to the direct, optimistic cheerfulness of the delightful "Anyday Will Be Fine".

The album's climax is probably reached with the eighth track, the marvelous "Prayers For The Paranoid" (curiously released in an acoustic version on the European edition and an electric version on the American one). It's one of the absolute high points of Neil Halstead's songwriting, as well as a kind of poetic manifesto for the band (“And thease clouds keep on rolling/ And I, I don’t know why/ Take this guitar from my hands/ I surrender/ This town don’t need drunkards/ Or singers of bad poetry/ They need dancing + drugs + laughter/ And we don’t have them/ Just pray for us/ Pray for sunshine/ Thease days are cold/ And I’m missing you/ This letter was meant for your eyes/ Destroy it and then just go hide/ Your the only thing left/ That make any sense/ Please don’t blow it”).

As with Out Of Tune, the only downside of Excuses For Travellers is the definitive confirmation that Rachel Goswell's role in the band has by now been decidedly scaled back compared to a few years earlier, although the lovely singer continues to provide her precious contribution as bassist and backing vocalist, as well as writer and lead voice on the delicate ninth track, titled "Bringin' Me Home". The album closes with the graceful "Got My Sunshine", a sunny track with almost gospel-like harmonies.

Less memorable, however, is the album cover, with a stylized drawing depicting a little figure holding a guitar, though this is truly a minor detail that does nothing to undermine an otherwise near-perfect record.

A masterpiece is always followed by a brief phase of reflection and reconsideration. In the three years separating Excuses For Travellers from the band's next album, Neil Halstead decided to try his hand at a solo career, releasing Sleeping On Roads in 2001. The record, co-produced by Nick Holton and made with trusted collaborators Ian McCutcheon, Alan Forrester and Mark Van Hoen, doesn't stray far from what he'd already done with Mojave 3, though it contains some more experimental elements that Neil Halstead would carry forward into the band's next album.

The key track for understanding this attempt at evolution is the fifth, titled "See You On Rooftops", which starts out as a sweet, intimate nursery-rhyme in classic Mojave 3 style, before evolving into a surprising psychedelic ride that stretches close to seven minutes. Also splendid is the third track, "Driving With Bert", a ballad enriched by Mark Armstrong's poignant trumpet.

The rest of the album is highly enjoyable, business-as-usual material (albeit of great quality), with a lovely cover featuring an illustration by Chantal Awbi.

In 2003 Mojave 3 returned with Spoon And Rafter, probably their most complex and unresolved record. The album opens with the nine-minute mini-suite "Bluebird Of Happiness", decidedly one of the high points of Neil Halstead's body of work, a splendid pop song heavily tinged with psychedelia. Unfortunately the rest of the record doesn't live up to that remarkable opening: the songs have lost the immediacy that had marked the previous two albums, veering instead toward a kind of stark, introverted pop, at times streaked with psychedelia, at times vaguely progressive, extremely interesting but also not very immediate or easy to enjoy.

Rachel Goswell's role is reduced to an all-time low (and, once again, it really is a shame). The album cover, on the other hand, is gorgeous: an elegant digipack in rough cardboard featuring a beautiful bucolic illustration. Co-produced once again by trusted collaborator Mark Van Hoen.

In 2004 a small but significant dream came true for every Slowdive and Mojave 3 fan: a Rachel Goswell solo album. The record, titled Waves Are Universal and released, as usual, on 4AD, didn't meet with great critical success, but on close listening it proves well worth reassessing.

Rachel Goswell, aided by Joe Light, David Naughton and Ashley Bates (former drummer of shoegazers Chapterhouse), delivers a handful of delicate, supremely elegant songs, admirably poised between the dream-pop of Cocteau Twins and the ancient, glorious tradition of British folk (perhaps in the electric variant brilliantly developed in the Seventies by Fairport Convention), which, ennobled by the singer's sublime voice, often really do manage to be dreamlike. It's precisely Rachel's sweet, introverted, beguiling voice that is the added value of this underrated album — perhaps not an outright masterpiece, but nonetheless essential to understanding the arc of Slowdive and Mojave 3.

The album opens with the remarkable "Warm Summer Sun", a fine folk-driven track that at times (especially in the uilleann pipes played by Jerome Farrell) strongly evokes the extraordinary Planxty of Christy Moore, the Irish group among the leading standard-bearers of Celtic folk. The collection's catchiest, most appealing moment comes with the third track, titled "No Substitute", a splendid ballad that places Rachel Goswell within the lineage of the best female rock songwriting.

With the dreamy "Delay", "Plucked" and "Hope", we move instead into the territory of Elizabeth Fraser and her Cocteau Twins, while "Coastline" and "Save Yourself" come across as tenser, more electric, almost shoegaze. Worth noting, once again, is the album cover, featuring an illustration by T. Jackiewecz, while the booklet includes a new photo by friend Alan Forrester, clearly still right at home with a camera in his hands.

Mojave 3's return to CD came in 2006 with Puzzles Like You, and it's a bullseye once again. The record (recorded without guitarist Simon Rowe) is probably the liveliest, most upbeat album the English band ever made, marked by a fresh, thoroughly enjoyable guitar-driven indie-pop that leaves behind the cerebral, somewhat gloomy atmospheres of Spoon And Rafter and finally restores Rachel Goswell, too often sidelined in the band's earlier productions, to her rightful place.

There's no let-up across the album's tracklist, which strings together a series of brilliant, engaging songs, magnificently blending the band's trademark bittersweet attitude with the airy, guitar-driven moods of this unexpected "new direction". "Truck Driving Man", "Puzzles Like You" and "Running With Your Eyes Closed" are lively and fun, "Breaking The Ice", probably the album's masterpiece, is yet another perfect song written by Neil Halstead, "Most Days" is a delicate ballad that brings Mojave 3 back to the atmospheres of Out Of Tune and Excuses For Travellers, "Big Star Baby" is steeped in west-coast flavours, "To Hold Your Tiny Toes" is probably the most unbridled song the band has ever recorded, and "Just A Boy" surprises (and perhaps leaves one a little puzzled) with unexpected, unprecedented, almost post-punk moods mixed with bizarre country spices.

Lastly, the album's pictorial cover art and nice digipack round off an excellent package. The only shame is the lack of a booklet with the lyrics.

In 2008 Neil Halstead decided to record a new solo album and to make a substantial shift in how it was produced. The English singer, in fact, broke his decade-long partnership with 4AD and even chose to make the new album in the United States for the first time, specifically in Los Angeles for Brushfire Records, with new musicians and the first-ever co-production by Robert Carranza. It has to be said that the epoch-making changes behind Oh! Mighty Engine make perfect sense: Halstead's music, after all, has often looked across the ocean, and Mojave 3, despite nods to English indie-pop tradition, have always been a very "American" band, frequently drawing on alternative country and American folk. However you look at it, one fact remains indisputable: Oh! Mighty Engine is a splendid record that gives fans an intimate, delicate Neil Halstead perhaps like never before, with light, dreamy ballads as caressing as a spring breeze.

Twelve magnificent songs, precious little gems to be jealously kept in heart and soul: it opens with the delicate, relaxed title track, a ballad for guitar, voice and little else, which immediately sets out the guidelines for the whole album, which proceeds through small, often barely perceptible, variations, always tasteful and substantial, like the (not too) electric guitar of "Elevenses", the barely-there piano of "Little Twig", the banjo of "Witless Or Wise", the drums of the (slightly) rhythmic "Paint A Face", the self-sufficiency of "Always The Good", "Sometimes The Wheels", "Spinning For Spoonie" and "Baby I Grew You A Beard", on which Neil Halstead manages entirely on his own, with the help of guitar, bass and, occasionally, keyboards.

The album's cover art is quirky and the digipack packaging rather bare-bones, once again, unfortunately, without a booklet.

Neil Halstead's third solo album, enigmatically titled Palindrome Hunches, came out in September 2012, after a full four years of silence - probably too long a stretch for the ever-shifting constellations of rock and its surroundings, which, in their perpetual hunt for the "next big thing", sometimes risk burning through their idols too quickly, lacking the patience to wait for the unhurried pace of a craftsman who shapes his work with the meticulous patience of someone little interested in the tight schedules of fame and success.

The new record, released like its predecessor by California's Brushfire Records and co-produced by Nick Holton, who had already worked with Halstead on Sleeping On Roads, is probably the sparest and most stripped-down the English musician has ever recorded in his now long career: guitar, bass, the odd touch of piano, occasionally some strings lending the work clear folk overtones.

The eleven tracks unwind along the thread connecting the inexhaustible wealth of British folk music to the hushed, moving songwriting of the great Nick Drake, right up to contemporary (re)interpreters of the tradition like Alexi Murdoch. The best of Neil Halstead's new album is probably found in the intimate, touching Mojave 3-like atmospheres of "Digging Shelters", in the thoroughly enjoyable indie-pop (with a few echoes of Belle and Sebastian) of the ballad "Bad Drugs And Minor Chords", in the melancholy (almost proudly claimed as an existential calling?) of the long, supremely elegant "Wittgenstein's Arm", in the solemn, perhaps slightly brooding folk of the splendid "Tied To You", and in the simple, "clean" melody of the caressing "Full Moon Rising".

Taken as a whole, even in its perhaps less significant moments, Palindrome Hunches flows by pleasantly, carrying with it the flavour - or perhaps just the illusion - of a walk through the wistful splendour of a late-summer afternoon along the cliffs of Cornwall (Halstead's home for years now), with the sea meeting the sky and merging with it in a thousand shifting shades of grey, the very same shades painted by the music of a shy, reserved artist who has made intimacy and aching melancholy his unmistakable stylistic signature.

Towards the end of 2013, after many years of strict indie-pop allegiance, Neil Halstead made the unexpected decision to revive the electric, shoegaze sounds of the never-forgotten Slowdive and channel them into the psychedelic, spacey settings of a new project called Black Hearted Brother, working closely with his friends Nick Holton and Mark Van Hoen. Stars Are Our Home, the trio's debut, a few overlong stretches aside, is an interesting work that could well mark a new starting point in the human and artistic story of the introverted English musician.

With Mojave 3 now on hiatus for far too long, nostalgia keeps growing for the sublime trademark sound of a band that sadly never achieved the success it deserved: we remain hopeful for further developments, wishing the dream can carry on.

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