When we reviewed StevieRay Latham and the Nomads of Industrial Suburbia, our reviewer commented that StevieRay Latham had no intention of letting the grass grow under his feet. That foretelling statement proved true when he returned with his self-produced ‘Letters from Suburbia’, which completed a trilogy of EPs released over the previous 18 months.
He returns on 29th July with his ‘Hinterland EP’, from which we have the pleasure of sharing his video for “Fugitive”.
Fugitive is driven by an up-tempo, folk-rock groove and urgent, lyrical story-telling, which sweeps the listener into an allegorical world of existential psychodrama and substance abuse.
Written in one session, like the stream-of-conscious script to a lost road-movie, “Fugitive” has the freak-folk meets indie-rock stylings of Kevin Morby, Simon Joyner or Herman Dune, marrying strummed guitars and loose percussion layers with a vintage synth playing an Eastern flavoured lead line and lyrical wanderings inspired by the likes of Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen.
“Yes he’d had enough, just as I have come to realise, the world don’t turn for us, it has its own agenda figured out, around the cold vacuum of space, washed away again” Latham’s lyrics poetically play with profundity and mundanity, creating every-day revelations and micro-dramas from soggy cigarette cartons and unsent postcards.
StevieRay tells us:
I wrote Fugitive at a time when I was living up in North London doing an art degree. I was reading a lot of Sartre and Camus and other existentialist kinds of stuff and one day, I typed out the full song in a stream of conscious kind of writing exercise. A few years later, I started playing around with the structure after listening to some Arkady Severny records. Severny was this Soviet singer-songwriter who combined folk music with elements of garage rock and lounge jazz and this kind of crossover approach really appealed to the kind of things that I wanted to do, so I added some drums and percussion along with an attempt at an eastern-inspired synth line to pay homage to some of Severny’s narrative prison songs which in turn linked back to the song’s title which I’d originally only chosen as a kind of metaphor but which felt like a good fit for the new style of the recording.
The video for ‘Fugitive’ was directed by photographer and artist George Rayner, who also provided the cover art for the EP. The cine film was developed using George’s unique, eco-friendly process (a caffenol-based developer formula that includes coffee and seaweed ingredients), resulting in an organic and nostalgic feeling work which uses the parable of a dead sailor to tackle the current crisis of our eroding coastlines.
The work of Latham is so multi-layered…on the surface, he melodically hooks you in, but there is so much more going on beneath the surface. His focus on the commonplace is reminiscent of the Beat writers whose influence has filtered through the ages shaping much of the post-war radical music scene. I really feel that connection with his work, like he’s from another generation – so much so that it really wouldn’t surprise me if he took up residence at 9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur in the Latin Quarter of Paris for his next offering, just to try out Burroughs cut-up technique.
His approach to music, and the results, are inspiringly refreshing. Get on board.
Hinterland EP is out on 29th July 2022
https://www.stevieraylatham.com/