Michael J. Sheehy – Distance Is The Soul of Beauty
Independent – 2 October 2020
His first solo album for ten years, arriving in the wake of (though not necessarily inspired by) sobriety, marriage and fatherhood, intimate and quietly played (unlike his work with Miraculous Mule) and sung, the title taken from French philosopher Simone Weil’s writing about God and the music variously influenced by the Velvets, Elvis, Brigid Mae Power and Suicide.
It opens with a simple acoustic plea to Tread Gently, Leave No Scar “as you move across the land”, which can be read as much about not damaging the environment as it is about not “going around breaking lover’s hearts”. Bless Your Gentle Litte Soul introduces a wider instrumentation and a more upbeat melody that has a languid air of Brian Ferry about it as he sings his appreciation to a friend for being dragged from the hole into which he’d fallen and for “keeping faith in me/And seeking out the good no-one else could see”
Backed by drum machine, addressing the pangs that love can inflict, We Laugh More Than We Cry (“and we cry a lot”) is another with a laid back Ferry air, while, ruminatively sung over an equally sparse electric guitar Turn Back For Home is another song about turning your life and path around (“It’s getting dark now/But it’s not too late/To turn around” and that “If love will not comfort us/Then it will surely light our way/And show us where we ought to be/At the dying of the day”.
There’s an ineffable sadness to the similar minimal and Cohen-like slow waltzing The Girl Who Disappeared, “a ragged junkshop saint/Rejected and scorned/She walked the filthy city streets/A ghost yet to be born” that speaks of society’s indifference to those who find themselves exiled from life, the final line a nod to musicians “who sing/To sanctify our shame” and not just for fame.
“I can’t remember what I came here for Gravity has nailed me to the floor/Staring at a bill I cannot pay”, he sings at the start of I Have To Live This Way which, mingles Dylan’s I Shall Be Released and Not Dark Yet, a song asking for understanding of the narrator’s self-destructiveness and broken dreams not pity “because I made my choice/A hand full of nothing for my broken voice” and that “I’m not saved but I’m okay”.
Bringing a late night jazzy mood with pensive resonator guitar and buzzing strings, Blue Latitudes and Starless Skies returns to themes of being lost and led astray in darkness, but clinging to the “hope someday to see your face again” because “If you are lost forever, where does that leave me?”
Perhaps the darkest lyrically is the poetic Cohenesque semi-spoken Judas Hour, a song of betrayal “The cracked lips that kiss/Your tear stained cheek/Conceal the teeth/That would rip you apart”, the guitar turning to a throaty snarl as he sings that “Honour is for pimps and thieves/Who wear their hatred on their sleeve” before slipping back into the brooding pulse.
Understated shimmers of reverb guitar introduce the album’s folksiest but also most clearly Suicide-influenced number, Blackout of Arrows, another song of toxicity (“We are box office poison/The spit in your eye/The small print in the contract/The itch between your thighs/The black sheep of dark horses/The truth you cannot swallow”, though it might well also be about that nagging darkness of doubt and anxiety that can infest the mind.
It ends with drum machine again on another Suicide-styled electronics and guitar, Everything That Rises Must Converge offering a closing note of optimism and hope that “All things shall be well/Beneath and beyond the sun”, a call to “live for something/That can’t be bought or sold” and that “We will not be overcome”. Distance may indeed bring beauty into perspective, but I highly recommend you get up and close and intimate with this.
Distance Is The Soul Of Beauty is out now. Order via Bandcamp: https://michaeljsheehy.bandcamp.com/album/distance-is-the-soul-of-beauty