David John Morris
Wyld Love Songs
Self Released
28 October 2022
Last year Red River Dialect frontman David John Morris released his first solo album, Monastic Love Songs. It was, as the title suggests, a reflective, self-exploratory collection of songs written during and about the time he spent in a Buddhist retreat in Canada. Full of soft-focus guitars, eccentrically clattering percussion and quiet experimental touches, that album managed to be both expansive and insular: Morris’s lyrics spanned continents while assessing his own place in the world.
Wyld Love Songs is not so much a follow-up to Monastic Love Songs as a companion piece, a kind of distorted echo through time. On his return from Canada, Morris took up the shared guardianship of a condemned building in London, an old care home taken over by sixty people looking for somewhere comparatively cheap to live in the capital. Here he endured the Covid lockdown, played table tennis and wrote the demos that would become Wyld Love Songs.
While its predecessor was grounded and contemplative, this is a record on the move, constantly aware of the passing of time. Where before, Morris would observe the world and his own past in a basically passive way, here he is more actively engaged with his surroundings – a necessary adjustment given his drastic change in living conditions. Opener Karaoke’s driving melodicism and the slightly drunken backing vocals that kick in towards the end of the song immediately give a sense of communality and openness.
The songs are built on skittish drum machines and confident guitars; the result is – to paraphrase a lyric in Pebble – both edgy and gentle. In fact, Pebble is the perfect example of the dichotomies and strange alignments that Morris likes to play around with. The instrumentation veers between gooey and scuzzy and Morris’s writing verges on the surreal: at one point, he describes himself as an orangutan. But he’s also capable of straight-up balladry, as on TT’s Surf School, which allows his voice – revealing slightly quavering – to come to the forefront. Here, and on the gentle swell of The Rug, the album’s elegiac qualities shine brightest.
It’s tempting to try to locate Morris within the lineage of great British eccentrics and outsider artists like Syd Barrett or Robyn Hitchcock, but the thing about outsider artists is that they don’t really fit in with any lineage. For the most part, these are people with a very well-defined personal artistry that happens to be very different to what anyone else is doing. Morris clearly has a sharply-drawn vision of what his songs should sound like, and the fact that the ones on this album are so raw and unprocessed is evidently part of that vision. The songwriting itself can be complex, and the frame of reference extremely wide: closer Neowise, for instance, displays an in-depth knowledge of the properties of comets. And the extra instrumentation when it does occur (as on the shimmering, textured Like Leonardo or the fiddle-heavy Raqiya) is handled expertly. Most of the added extras are provided by his old Red River Dialect pals.
At times, these songs verge on soft-rock territory, but the softness is always hijacked by a gloriously strange lyrical left-turn – talk of convergent evolution and primatologists on Black Kite, for example. Or you will suddenly have the musical rug pulled out from underneath you (Black Kite’s dubby echoes).
Ballad of Ross Wyld, the album’s eight-minute beating heart, grows from Robin Williamson-esque lyrical oddness via Robin Lane Roberts’ cascading keys and references to Robin Williams in Hook to eventually create a kind of origin story for the whole album. The song then transcends itself in its final couple of minutes, almost seeming to leave the ground as Morris finds a new clarity in his voice.
There is, above all, a sense of fun and freedom on Wyld Love Songs, which is all the more remarkable given the fact that the album came out of a time of uncertainty, uprootedness and potential illness. These songs, personal and specific as they often are, show the generosity of the human spirit in all its humour, wisdom and sadness.
Wylde Love Songs is released on 28 October 2022.
Pre-Order here: https://davidjohnmorris.bandcamp.com/album/wyld-love-songs
You can also Pledge to get a 12″ vinyl record of Wyld Love Songs if the campaign reaches its goal via Bandcamp. Details here.
Nov 6th Album launch show at Café OTO, London (with all members of Red River Dialect involved, presenting solo projects: family time)