STEVE ADEY - Do Me A Kindness

Nine cover versions and an adaptation of a piece of writing by Herman Hesse are the raw material of what was meant to be a brief interlude between Steve Adey's old and new album, and which ended up turning into a much larger project.

The Scottish musician recorded the ten tracks almost entirely alone inside a nineteenth-century church in Edinburgh, later adding vocal and instrumental contributions from other musicians and friends.

The glacial, solemn and dark tone of the Birmingham-born artist's intricate slow-core doesn't give an inch: other people's material, while retaining its own lyrical identity, becomes something else entirely in the musician's hands, often drained of that residual emotion which Steve has always preferred to replace with silence.

It's undeniably blasphemous and hardly endearing, the metamorphosis undergone by Morrissey's "Everyday Is Like Sunday", here tamed into an almost hypnotic spiritual liturgy, but for those who aren't devotees of cover versions, the transfiguration of this and other untouchable songs is simply lyrical territory where Steve Adey hones his poignant poetics of pain, solitude and death.

Next it's Bob Dylan and his "I Want You" subjected to yet another sonic skinning, with an outrageous reinterpretation that sounds as though sung and arranged by a Leonard Cohen in a state of permanent alcoholic haze, with that clumsy electronic sound that frays the poetry and reduces it to a harmless pop song.

Steve Adey's ethereal yet baritone-tinged voice is noticeably more at ease on PJ Harvey's bleak, intense "The Devil", and he similarly excels when, with just a few piano notes and percussion gently in the background, he reinvents Mary Margaret O'Hara's splendid "To Cry About". It's likewise no easy task to capture the atmosphere of Nick Cave's "God Is In The House", but the sound of the harmonium lends Adey a small helping hand, foreshadowing the most successful and intelligent reinterpretations on "Do Me A Kindness".

The first is Portishead's "Over", where the Scottish musician strays into gothic territory with spectral, glacial inflections that underline every poetic nuance of the lyrics. Equally inspired is the poignant, dark "Murdered" by Low, which heightens the album's emotional tension, before Herman Hesse's poem, set to music by Adey himself with a delicate interweaving of violin, drum and voices ("How Heavy the Days"), and the minimal country textures of Smog's "River Guard" bring down the curtain on a record that will hardly find a place in year-end round-ups.

And yet that brief quotation of David Bowie's "Sense Of Doubt", placed at the end of Rickie Lee Jones's opening "The Unsigned Painting", leaves one puzzled and taken aback - perhaps Steve Adey's real aim wasn't to console us with romantic, melancholy certainties, but to plant a seed of doubt, that strange sensation which, for instance, after making you set aside "Do Me A Kindness", pushes you to reconsider the meaning of art, making you appreciate its darkest, least comfortable side, the very same one that can be glimpsed at times throughout this sorrowful album.

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11/11/2017