DANIELSON - Ships

The Danielson Famile is the fascinating project that, ten years ago, Daniel Smith and his siblings (five in total) put together, with the help of an endless multitude of friends and guests.

The band (which has, over the years, gone under various names: Tri-Danielson, Br. Danielson and, today, finally, as originally intended, simply Danielson) sets out to champion the principles of the Catholic faith, launching into hymns to life, joy and love.

The label most often pinned on them is christian-rock, which, translated into musical terms, doesn't really mean anything.

What the Danielsons offer is actually a pretty substantial sonic jumble, where a bit of everything converges. The foundation is folk, a Holy Modal Rounders-style folk with the acid component stripped away from Stampfel's band. Ultra-chaotic, unhinged, bizarre, festive: close to the chaos of Animal Collective, but not primitivist; noisy, but not noise-rock.

The description has only just begun. There are other sonic influences at play too: indie-rock, which steers them away from pre-war-style archaisms, and glam (Smith has said he's an admirer of Bowie, and you can hear it, though I'd also point to T.Rex).

Summing it all up, what emerges is a sort of folk version of Arcade Fire.

"Ships", featuring around forty musicians (among them members of Deerhoof, Sufjan Stevens and Why?) with a wide array of instrumentation (voices, handclaps, acoustic and electric guitars, bass, percussion, drums, marimba, glockenspiel, keyboards, violins, flute, clarinet, trumpets, trombone, oboe), is their latest work, an extremely ambitious project that channels everything the Smith family has conceived and tried out across their years as a band.

"Ship The Majestic Suffix" opens with low-voiced arpeggios, startled by violent jolts of guitars and bells and horns (near-omnipresent throughout the record) underlining the slowdowns: the song's structure is eccentric too, opening up halfway through into a hyper-romantic, choral psalm, before collapsing back onto the opening notes.

The hugely inflated sound and the voice, an irritating falsetto that's frighteningly anti-musical, represent at once an added value (because against all this, a harmony of fragile, highly complicated balance is found) and a limitation (on accessibility: to manage to take in "Ships" all in one go you'll need to toughen up, and whoever isn't used to such trials will hardly enjoy it, unfortunately).

After this fine intro, things start getting serious (well, maybe that's not quite the right expression).

The ships set sail to the sustained violins and the "come on"s of "Cast It At The Setting Sail", whose journey is undermined by choral accelerations and crescendo-building shoves, in a riot of voices and horns.

The idea of a walk startled by sudden bursts of speed will be one of the most successful and most recurring harmonic solutions here. "Bloodbook On The Halfshell" does it too, with everything soon turning into a vortex, full of continuous splashes and blares: the interruption arrives abruptly, with a glam coda of big electric guitars.

"Did I Step On Your Trumpet" attempts a different solution, pairing noir/musical-horror guitars, complete with spectral synths, with an opening melodically swollen with epos, featuring choruses of children and young women.

The three tracks described are rich in ideas and imagination, each more beautiful than the last. Sometimes the pace slows, into relaxed or nocturnal folk pieces, where the instrumental counterpoints, though massively present, really are counterpoints and not the main focus: that's the case with "When It Comes To You, I'm Lazy" and "My Lion Sleeps Tonight".

The result here is good but not astonishing: Smith is more convincing when the alchemy demands greater difficulty and strays into pop and rock territory. As in "Two Sitting Ducks", caught between ultra-pop and glam, whistles and Bobby Conn and unpredictable harmonies (perhaps the least linear track, which links "Ships" to the recent, and arguably even finer, "Destroyer's Rubies"), and in "Kids Pushing Kids", Arcade Fire-style disco-folk, wildly jumpy and darting, with gorgeous, gentle piano notes holding things together in the finale.

The simple solution is sought (and found well) just once, with the romantic and tender "He Who Flattened Your Flame Is Getting Torched" and its pop-jazz veins. "Five Stars And Two Thumbs Up" is simply a pompous outro, revisiting a few earlier themes.

And so ends one of the most imaginative records of the year's start, a work that's perhaps not innovative but is undoubtedly original, too uncompromising to make a massive impact (which amounts more to a flaw than anything else) and yet one that will find its admirers.

An outsider of great quality.

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12/05/2006