LIAM HAYES AND PLUSH - Dancing Backwards

Liam Hayes has never made compromises. A radical choice, paid for dearly with the lack of commercial success of the many albums released under his own name and under the moniker Plush.
In 2002, fresh off the fascinating piano-driven debut "More You Becomes You", the Chicago musician was dropped by Drag City for demanding a six-figure budget for his second record, "Fed".
After finding temporary refuge only in the Japanese market, Hayes's precious pop-rock-soul album was finally rescued from oblivion in 2008 thanks to a belated but valuable reissue by Broken Horse. For a moment fortune seemed to turn, but the lukewarm reception given to "Bright Penny" pushed him to give in to the lure of lo-fi with the following, and not entirely successful, "Slurrup".
Having abandoned the sumptuous baroque and orchestral architectures of the past, Hayes has remained a critics' darling, but has been irrevocably confined to the margins of the scene. It's no surprise, then, that for his next release in 2020 he dug out "Mirage Garage", a minimal project pressed only on cassette two years earlier.

Now, with "Dancing Backwards", Hayes finally returns to his former glory. By his side once again is old ally Thomas Washington, aka Tom Tom 84 – already at the helm of strings and horns on "Fed" and a longtime collaborator of Chi-Lites, Earth, Wind & Fire and Phil Collins. But the album's true master of ceremonies is Vincent Carlo, celebrated soundtrack composer, here acting as musician and producer alongside Washington's son.
Handing over the final sound to outside hands freed Hayes from the weight of the control room, allowing him to focus on his real talent: songwriting. The result is his most varied, intriguing and inspired album in recent memory.

Alongside his usual elegance and intelligently retro magic, the musician brings an unusual self-deprecating streak, made explicit right from the opening track "We Need You": a song steeped in Todd Rundgren-esque echoes, in which a plea for attention addressed to a noisy audience goes unanswered, dissolving into indifference. And indifference is exactly the fate to which an album like this seems condemned. Who, today, could possibly care about the refined Donald Fagen-style pop-jazz groove of "C-Thru"? Or the infectious disco-soul romanticism of the title track, where the author lines up youthful passions that maturity risks branding as anachronistic?
The truth is that every track is deliciously out of time. The duet with Alma Cook on "What Is A Man" shamelessly straddles the '70s and '80s, while the sensual soul of "Good Year", driven by organ and horns, has the flavour of those radio-friendly tunes that rock purists love to listen to in secret and disparage in public: it's hard to resist the compelling funky guitar swagger and the interplay between Fender Rhodes and horns in the album's superb arrangements.

If ballads like the cinematic "All In The Shadows" and the lush "Bright Penny" (not to be confused with the album of the same name) converse from afar with the contemporary retro-soul of Durand Jones or the Delines, it's Hayes's songwriting that makes the difference, turning every song into an event.
In the second half of the record, memories give way to a raw and painful vulnerability. On "Alone All Day" the author confesses the struggle of piecing together everyday life, while a pained voice floats over a hypnotic bass-driven funk groove.
The descent into the soul's lower depths continues with "Furnace Bird", which evokes the smoky atmosphere of an old jazz club, and with the gloomy daydream of the splendid soul-blues of "Final Night". Everything finally finds respite in the ethereal closing page of "White Bike": here, orchestral grandeur in the style of Burt Bacharach takes centre stage once more, bringing down the curtain on a work that may well struggle to climb the year-end charts, but whose singular charm promises great rewards for those willing to seek it out.

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28/08/2026