Dan Whitehouse – Dreamland Tomorrow
Reveal Records – 1 May 2020
There is, somewhere, an alternate reality, one in which Ed Sheeran is a cult singer-songwriter whose work gets critical acclaim from those in the know but never manages to trouble the charts, but where, the equally deserving Dan Whitehouse basks in universal praise for his brilliantly constructed melodies and insightful, emotionally resonant lyrics and whose albums sell by the truckload across the world, each new release guaranteed to top charts far and near. Sadly, in this reality, the scales of musical justice remain out of balance, but, just maybe, this latest release, a double album, from the Wolverhampton singer-songwriter will match critical approbation with commensurate commercial success.
Dan’s work has never been less than assured and sophisticated. Still, the first of the two discs, Dreamland, unveils a strikingly new maturity and willingness to push the envelope, adopting an experimental approach and more expansive sound palette in which to couch its dark, brooding intensity. Label MD Tom Rose was recruited to produce, and John Elliot from The Little Unsaid came on board to record and mix as well as play keyboards alongside, Dan, Eric Lane and minimalist composer Richard J. Birkin. At the same time, award-winning jazz musician Xhosa Cole contributes flute to one of the numbers with Barney Morse-Brown on strings.
The writing too took on a different shape, experimenting with writing the instrumental parts first and also collaborating on the lyrics with, among others, Elliott, Ben Matthew, John Tarver and Boo Hewardine, of whom more later. It opens with the title track, the sound of waves giving way to a circling piano pattern, strings and percussive clicks on a semi-spoken number that weaves an appropriately dreamlike atmosphere on a song (at times evocative of Bowie’s more haunted moments) summoning a sort of post-apocalypse childhood fairground, inviting the listener to “dance in the centre and watch this place fall”.
Next up is the first of two relatively cover versions suggested by Rose, a softer and more melancholic reading of Weightlifting, the ‘escape from depression’ title track of the 2004 album by Trashcan Sinatras, the other being a piano and strings arrangement (as opposed to acoustic guitar) of Crazy On The Weekend, the title track from the only album ever made by short-lived Nottingham outfit Sunhouse featuring Shane Meadows collaborator Gavin Clark.
Back with the original numbers, pulsating bass percolates throughout The State of the English, plangent piano notes punctuating a Brexit snapshot of a country divided and run to ruin with closed shops and rough sleepers, leading into a flute heralding the dawn awakening of the motorik rhythm I Became The City as John Large’s drums make the first of two appearances on a song of identity swallowed up with the urban cattle.
The Exit offers a brief echoey piano interlude paving the way for, picking up on a similar theme, the six-minute plus neurosis of Glass with its puttering beat and clamorous guitar lines as he sings how “fear’s the only proof I exist”, a song that shares a spirit with the disturbing visions of Bowie’s Diamond Dogs album.
Underpinned with pulsing keys, the sparsely constructed second title track, Tomorrow, sounds a more positive note, a carpe diem number in which, he exults “beauty is making someone you love care less about tomorrow”.
A second keyboard instrumental, the ethereal wash of Rough Sleeper, leads into Fighting For Air as the mood darkens once more, the bass brooding and prowling like a strobe light stalking its prey as the image of a “real pea-souper” and smog that “sucked the air out of the future” serve as metaphors for societal disorientation that leaves us “stabbing blind in the dark”.
A brief instrumental reprise of Dreamland ushers in What I Didn’t See, the six-minute playout track, the second to feature drums, crackling fire and bird song effects introducing a Peter Gabriel-like number which, with a repeating Floydian guitar phrase is itself wholly instrumental save for the final second as, ending on an uplifting epiphany, Alison Freegard softly speaks the words “What I didn’t see, what I didn’t realise is everything is perfect all the time”.
Disc two, by contrast, is a more intimate and naked affair, largely down to just voice and guitar as in a live setting, albeit with splashes of upright bass, Wurlitzer and flugelhorn. It’s produced by Boo Hewardine who also adds guitar and has two co-write credits as well as a cover of an old track.
Emily Barker provides backing vocals on the magnificent opening track, Teach You How To Fly which, co-written with Jason Tarver, was inspired by and based on a BBC documentary about Illinois aerial performer Jennifer Bricker who, although born without legs, was a gymnastics champion at the age of 11, having fallen in love with the sport after watching 14-year-old Dominique Moceanu win a gold medal for America at the 1996 Olympics. As it turned out, they had an even closer connection. Of Romanian birth, Bricker had been adopted when she was just a few months old, and she subsequently discovered that Moceanu was her sister.
It’s followed by the lullabying melody of Hewardine-co-write In My Dreams, sleep as a release from the trials of the day where “I’m singing melodies that are never heard… and I know contentment at last”. They pair again on the throbbing bassline and scratchy guitar notes of Remembering, Rosalie Deighton providing basslines on a musing on the passing of time and the way “each of us recall each summer spring and fall/A little differently”.
Andy Diagram’s warm flugelhorn sets the scene for One More Year; a bruised heart slow waltzing about looking back and the loss of a love you clung to, the emotion welling as his voice rises. A simple strum carries Jesus, a prayer for help and comfort in hard times that calls out to mother, lover, sister and stranger, bridges over troubled waters when you’re feeling small.
Accompanied by spare but plangent guitar, again written with Tarver and based on a documentary, The Wall In Her Head is a powerful lyric about Christine Beynon who was born in London but lived for some 40 years in a small, conservative Irish village where after her wife died, came out as female in her mid-60s and went on to document her transition in a series of photo self-portraits.
Castaway strikes a musically lighter note with a slow romantic waltzer about loneliness, though it’s hard not to suspect there’s a darker reading to lines like “I found you when the lights went down, /I just had to touch you to make it real”.
Written with Elliott, A Simple Loop again touches on memories. It comes steeped in regrets of “things that cannot be unseen” with an enigmatic lyrics that touch on parenthood (“we live for them, ’til they can play on their own”), something that also informs the minimal keyboards-backed Given Up (“I’m driving my son the 60-hour drive to let him see the man he could become”) and the distance that grows between the generations.
It ends, Hewardine on guitar rather than piano, with a lovely reading of The Birds Are Leaving from his 1999 album Thanksgiving, a downbeat, collapsing relationship note but one that radiates the very human heart that beats throughout this disc.
Two musically contrasting albums, but both consummate expressions of a master craftsman and wordsmith at the peak of his prowess. Given those alternate realities, I mentioned, I know which one I’d rather live in.
Pre-Order Dreamland Tomorrow via Reveal – https://revealrecords.co.uk/releases/dreamland-tomorrow/
http://www.dan-whitehouse.com/