PIANO MAGIC - Part-Monster

If there's an artist on today's music scene with a clearly defined and recognizable signature, yet still capable of expressing himself through a remarkable variety of forms, it's certainly Glen Johnson who, alongside his many other artistic ventures, returns two years after the acclaimed "Disaffected" with his most beloved and longest-running creation.

Before delving into this new Piano Magic album, it's worth putting the recent pieces of Johnson's artistic mosaic back in order, an essential step to understand the genesis of "Part-Monster", a record that - it's best to make this clear from the outset - tends to diverge quite a bit from its immediate predecessor musically, while maintaining, and indeed further developing, the emotional approach of all his latest works.

Having once again explored an electronic form that is only seemingly glacial on the EP "Incurable", and having relegated the homages to electronic dark-wave already present on "Disaffected" to the Future Conditional project, Johnson here entrusts in equal measure to guitars more assertive than ever and to atmospheres that are at once serene and sinister the continuation of his journey through the weaknesses of the human soul.

After the torments of "The Troubled Sleep Of Piano Magic" and the awareness of the inevitable overwhelming power of suffering found in "Disaffected", "Part-Monster" represents Johnson's partial answer to the reasons behind his soul's unease, as something intimately bound up with human nature, yet still conveyed through emotions and feelings.

The musical expression of such conclusions could therefore only be very direct, and at times even rough-edged. Clear proof of this is given by the two versions of previously released tracks featured on this record, both translated into a deeply electric key: the 80s synths of "The Last Engineer" (already featured on the album released under the Future Conditional name) are in fact transformed into dry rhythms, grafted onto a persistent distortion and the usual spectral atmospheres, while the icy electronic guise of "Incurable" now gives way to waves of feedback that render all the more searing the effect of a lyric - among the most significant in Glen Johnson's poetics - centred on "emotional sickness", latent doubts and simulacra of unspoken words.

That the essence of the sound chosen for this album lies in the rediscovery of guitar distortions, as full-bodied as they are evanescent, is perfectly exemplified by the instrumental "Great Escapes", where driving rhythms and guitars chase each other in brief whirlwinds, tempered only by the characteristic enveloping sound that has by now become the distinctive mark of almost all of Glen Johnson's compositions. Along the same lines sits the most directly impactful track on the whole record, namely "The King Cannot Be Found", which, in a form that is only seemingly banal, reproduces the claustrophobic atmospheres of "Night Of The Hunter" before exploding into an unexpectedly post-punk finale. The full consecration of this spirit, which animates exactly half the tracks on "Part-Monster", finally comes from the last of the "full-throttle" tracks, "Saints Preserve Us", submerged beneath a cascade of distortion with a flavour that almost pays tribute to the sounds of the early 90s, and in particular to My Bloody Valentine, whom one's mind inevitably drifts to, also considering that the album was produced by none other than Guy Fixsen, responsible, among other things, for the immense "Loveless".

The remaining half of the record is instead made up of more measured tracks, perfectly in keeping with the character of Johnson's songwriting as expressed in now-distant works from the band's discography, such as "Low Birth Weight" and "Artists' Rifles". The points of contact with those records are numerous, especially on the enchanted ballad "England's Always Better (As You're Pulling Away)", where nostalgia drifts softly through bucolic, sepia-tinted landscapes, while brass arrangements - more melancholy than solemn - frame the deep voice of Simon Rivers (The Bitter Springs), whose last contribution to a Piano Magic album dated back precisely to the days of "Low Birth Weight". Further echoes of the band's past surface in some of the album's most effective passages, namely in the other desolate urban-folk ballad (sic) "Cities & Factories", at once hallucinatory and soothing, and in "Soldier Song", a track that moves with the sinister grace of a music box, its repetitive mechanisms softened by the increasingly compelling interpretation of Angéle David-Guillou.

On a similar register, finally, sit the two (relatively) lighter tracks that balance out Piano Magic's usual gloominess: thus "Halfway Through" has an almost sunny pace, likewise embellished by elegant horns, while the closing title track arrives to ease the preceding electric turmoil, sketching a placid acoustic finale with sadly self-deprecating lyrics ("I'm tired of being tired") that, once again, capture the spirit underlying this work.

The plurality of references highlighted above undoubtedly confirms the definition of "a man who lives in the past" that Glen Johnson has applied to himself; and yet, once the superficial impression of "already heard this before" is set aside, the many facets present in "Part-Monster" make it a work that is, as ever, sincere and by no means lacking in pathos, even though the band's renewed expressive directness partly dissipates the aura of mystery and constant sense of surprise that characterized their previous work. That said, it would be wrong to call this a predictable album or one that falls short of genuinely high expectations, precisely in light of what Piano Magic have proven so far. So, even if by the end of the listen there emerges a clear sense that Glen Johnson's compositional class shows itself at its best in a more electronic guise, it would be unduly harsh to hold it against "Part-Monster" that it follows two genuine masterpiece albums, whose overall level it fails to match, while still confirming the undeniable quality and versatility of his songwriting.

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16/05/2007