DUKE SPECIAL - Hallow

Theatre (Bertolt Brecht), singing (Ruby Murray), photography (Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand), fiction (Paul Auster, Mark Twain) and now poetry (Michael Longley): these are the cultural influences Peter Wilson (aka Duke Special) keeps flirting with, carrying on his own musical path, marked by a slightly vaudeville romanticism that's at times intense and dramatic.

The Irish musician has played with Ray Davies, Neil Hannon, Marie Brennan, Ed Harcourt, Matt Hales, was nominated in 2007 for a string of awards, including the Mercury Prize, won the Meteor Music Award in 2008, and boasts a long live career in which the piano is often the star, the catalyzing instrument of the Lisburn musician's sonic universe.

The product of a long correspondence with the poet, the music on “Hallow” sometimes sounds as if it's drifting out of an old transistor radio (“Remembering Carrigskeewaun”), or straight out of a musical (“A Questionnaire For Walter Mitty”), moving between playful, naive tones (“Granddaughters”) and dark, apocalyptic ones (“The Ice-cream Man”, with Longley himself as narrator).

Duke Special's new album is actually a small surprise: the pop digressions of "Look Out Machines?" had left a bitter taste for those who had appreciated the seductive, passionate touch of his early albums and, above all, the delightful trilogy of "The Stage, A Book & The Silver Screen".

Drawing on the inspiration and refined poetics of Michael Longley (the celebrated poet born in Belfast to English parents), the Irish musician stages the most mature and ambitious lyrical work of his career.

The inhuman violence of war set against the gentleness of love and nature, and the consequent therapeutic power of poetry championed by Longley, could not have found a better setting than the one created by Peter Wilson.

Over piano chords poised between classical and jazz, the album drifts between tracks that are at times ethereal and dreamlike ("Emily Dickinson", "No Continuing City") and at others jarring and dissonant ("Grace Darling", "Another Wren"), never crossing into the epic, instead preserving an almost theatrical rigor ("Brothers") that highlights the literary content, often underscoring its purity with natural sounds captured amid ocean waves or a flock of birds.

For Duke Special this new album was undoubtedly a tough and complex challenge: Michael Longley's spare, finely enchanting, almost meditative poetics seemed to have little in common with the musician's neo-romantic theatricality, but Wilson approached the poet's language with respect and genuine humility, learning to engage with its darker side ("Fifty Years"), discovering the most genuine essence of his own music ("Lena"), and ultimately crafting his most convincing and intense album.

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14/01/2018