Spellbound
Last testament of a great singersongwriter. By John Mulvey.
Richard Swift ★★★★ The Hex SECRETLY CANADIAN. CD/DL
EVEN IN his early days as a solo artist, Richard Swift was an aspirational chronicler of failure. The second album he recorded, 2003’s The Novelist, told of a pre-war writer, based on his own grandfather, thwarted by an inattentive world. That wry musical trinket led to a UK major label deal and 2007’s Dressed Up For The Letdown, on which he eulogised the great artists only celebrated after their careers were over. “Everyone loves you when you’re gone,” he sang on the single, Kisses For The Misses. It was not, of course, a hit. Eleven years on, the bleak ironies are multitude. Upon Swift’s death from hepatitis and “liver and kidney distress” in July, the tributes came flooding in: for his creative backroom graft as a multiinstrumentalist and producer for The Black Keys, The Shins, Damien Jurado and Lonnie Holley; and for the undervalued solo LPs that posited him as a cross between Elliott Smith and Harry Nilsson. Just before he died, Swift completed his first album in eight years – “11 songs performed by me for family and friends,” he announced on Instagram. As such, The Hex, expands brilliantly on a musical vision that had lain mostly dormant for that time. Like The Novelist, The Hex is chamber pop full of sharp songwriting and ornate arrangements, bathed in a kind of aural sepia wash. Even the psychedelic funk excursions, Selfish Math and Babylon, have a patina that enhances both their vintage potency and the reputation of Swift as a rogue classicist. But was he really such a man out of time? The Tin Pan Alley strut of Dirty Jim presents Swift as renegade piano man, lamenting how “every second is a battle I fought” as he knocks out another jaunty four-minute wonder. Broken Finger Blues, though, is one of several songs here whose retro-futurist soul fixtures – a heady mix of Curtis Mayfield, Jean-Claude Vannier and David Bowie, with a little Ernie Isley fuzz from Little Danny Horseback (AKA Dan Auerbach) – are reminiscent of the choices made by the Arctic Monkeys on Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino. An early version of Broken Finger Blues, it transpires, first surfaced in 2011. As with most posthumous albums, it’s hard not to hear intimations of mortality in The Hex. But the fatalistic tone – which encompasses professional ambition, familial commitment, alcohol issues and physical frailty – was central to Swift’s work from the start. A new poignancy comes in the closing run of songs, which memorialise the deaths of his mother and sister while cleaving close to his wife and children. Nancy, featuring backing vocals by his three daughters, amplifies a private tragedy into a widescreen melodrama. And the final, heartrending Sept 20 is a 21st wedding anniversary present to his wife. “Made a plan/Fixin’ myself,” he sings, whistling alone at his piano, “Trying not to drink/From a poison well”: a promise to try and endure, whatever life might throw at him next.