Silver Apples ‎- Clinging To A Dream

Chicken Coop

It’s a dull September afternoon, and it’s been tipping down for hours now. In contrast to this dismal weekend, Simeon Coxe‘s gentle trippy vibes are happily churning my ear, gliding the consciousness blissfully.

The first two tracks are all sun-kissed and jaunty, full of  light and airy wonder that the golden autumnal hues of the cover art describe so well. Simple certainties and hooky melodics that lilt as Coxe’s fine vocals beam out the fading grandeur of ’68, maybe not as cutting as the first two Silver Apples LPs, but somehow this doesn’t matter as he throws you gleefully off piste with the peyote poetry and off-key oscillations of “Colors”. A melancholy slippage that “Nothing Matters” pulls away from in giddy injections of wibble-wonder, sonically pouting, splurging plenty of fairground spun colour.

The noir-fed soundscape of “The Mist” refines his enquiring mind into a creepy somnambulistic crawl, Coxe lyrically whispering within its sodium hues, as fleeting foxes are caught in the glare of passing traffic eyes shining back at the headlights. A nocturnal wondering and throbbing bassline that bleeds superbly into the up-beat-i-tudes of “Susie”, where the tasty joys from Susie’s café menu are expounded in silver-finned darts, Delia Derbyshire jollies and happy clapper palms. A track destined for my end of year mixtape for sure, while after its initial Hitchcock tensions, “Fractal Flow” solidly pounds it out too, all fanfare triumphant and fleetly Theremin fancies.

Really loving the whirlybird natures of this release, the scribbled day-glows each track parades; yeah, sometimes it falls foul of its own simplicity, but then hops out of that snare to dance merrily again.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-