When you happen to listen to a record with a flawless shape, the first question that often arises is: but will there be substance under the shining surface? In fact, what may sound like a miracle at first glance risks to show its limits as time goes by.
Cosmo Sheldrake’s debut album is one of those records whose first impression has to be verified by subsequent listenings in order to assess its strength and specific weight.
At the first encounter, it is natural to blink your eyes and be fascinated or even amazed by the sound circus in front of you: sparkling arrangements made of millimetric joints and lush orchestrations that never cross the dangerous limit of kitsch.
At the end, the question is: has a star been born or is he just a brilliant aesthete?
So we pass with some trepidation (after having already bought the record, caught by an uncontrollable urge) to the second fateful listening, almost afraid that the impressive construction could suddenly collapse, showing a lack of foundations and revealing itself to be only a beautiful illusion.
The doubts, however, dissolve more and more with each new listening.
The young Englishman succeeds in integrating different worlds with surprising maturity: the compositional tradition of English pop with the virtuosity and fantasy in the arrangements and orchestrations of Sufjan Stevens or Owen Pallett, the ancient and the modern, the serious and the facetious
The whole album is enveloped in a playful and surreal Alice in Wonderland atmosphere, which cannot fail to recall the spirit of the great English lunatics like Syd Barrett or overseas madmen like They Might Be Giants and Mad Hatter Tom Waits.
But above all, beneath the colourful and appealing shell, lies a juicy pulp: the songs.
First and foremost, there are irresistible and infectious marches like ‘Wriggle’ and ‘Come Along’, which exude vitality and exuberance from every pore. The latter is the classic track that, if listened to in the middle of a traffic jam, will cause you to get looks of disapproval from other drivers as you frantically clap your hands on the steering wheel like an idiot to keep up to a non-existent beat.
But it’s not just rhythm. Try immersing yourself in the suffused atmosphere of ‘Solar Waltz’, which manages to gracefully and evenly combine a more intimate vein with sumptuous yet elegant orchestration.
And then there’s ‘Egg and Soldiers’ which jumps around in slow motion and makes you think of XTC with Kevin Ayers on vocals that, to celebrate a certain moody and quintessentially British style at its best, decided to stuff everything with strings somewhere between the vaudeville temptations of The Kinks and the avant-garde pop of The Beatles.
This whirlwind of names could lead one to think of a record filled with citations by an artist without an identity of his own, but the exact opposite emerges from “The Much Much How How How and I”: a strong personality that allows the author to synthesise his maximalist tendencies and various sources of inspiration into a strongly recognisable sound.
Finally, the collaboration with Matthew Herbert, an unconventional figure in British electronic music, suggests a possible and stimulating future direction for Sheldrake’s music, leading to greater integration with electronics.
After waiting for the second listening, we confidently await the English artist to the hard test of confirmation, but with no hurry…. Now in fact it is simply time to fully savour this complex and surprising debut.
