Album of the Week: Steve Adey – The Tower of Silence
Most PR emails can be instantly judged by their subject line and therefore remain unopened; even those that reference an ‘Edinburgh-based singer songwriter’ bring no guarantee of anything other than a sigh, as let’s face it that ground has been covered a million times over.
In hindsight we have no idea why a note about Steve Adey piqued our interest. The Tower of Silence isn’t his first album, not that we’d heard of him before, but on delving deeper we reckon we’ve dug up an absolute gem.
The latest slab of introspection to feature as our album of the week – closely following Jo Mango and Yusuf Azak - the English-born Adey has cooked up a record of low key beauty. As with all records where the pauses and quiet moments are equally as important as the music you hear, much hangs on the voice of the protagonist. Adey doesn’t disappoint on that front and his cracked tones are reminiscent of Bill Callahan or the late Mark Linkous.
The vocals shine brightest on Just Wait Till I Get You Home, his faintly Americanised words accompanied by little more that a gently strummed electric. There’s more to the album than just that template of course – Army of One has full percussion and mournful violin but its meagre two minute runtime will leave you frustrated, likewise With Tongues – alto singing and light breakbeats - which peters out before it really gets going. Perhaps the thought was that less would be more, but the two best things here feel like barely formed ideas, which is a crying shame.
If there’s an artist closer to home that Adey sounds like, it’s potentially Damien Rice. Now wait, come back – for every trite, over familiar ballad he did, Rice was perfectly capable of atmospheric, genuinely affecting fare. This is the kind of territory we’re talking about, such as the moody piano sounds of Farewell Sorrow here.
Laughing and The Field even feature some rather beautiful female vocals, the ideal accompaniment for Adey, helping lift two very good songs up a level.
Basically we’re claiming Adey generally and The Tower of Silence in particular as ours. We haven’t seen anyone else bar the Sunday Times write about him, and frankly they don’t count. Adey has the potential to straddle the roles of the credible singer-songwriter (Callahan, Oldham) with one that has wider appeal. A cheeky film soundtrack might help, but we don’t think such cheap marketing ploys are needed here. Go buy this, please.
We subjected Steve to the requisite grilling this week…
Why so long between albums?
Real life for the most part. I was working on the album for most of the time, but some of it was discarded. I record and produce myself, so I have a freedom of working without worrying about studio costs or time frame. The album mutates to the point where you become a passenger; an observer – the more you get immersed in the recording process the less control you have over the duration and possible trajectory.
What inspired the songs on The Tower of Silence?
Some of it is dealing with (and trying to figure) a way of working through relationships and friendships. The idea was to write/arrange in a folk setting but really fuck with the presentation so that it isn’t formulaic, but a strange, twisted version of folk music (they call it new weird Americana…or something like that, right?) The last thing I wanted was to sound like a guy playing acoustic guitar and singing about failed love.
Tell us about the recording process and the other musicians involved.
Helena MacGilp’s voice was a big part of the record. We did so much stuff that never made the final cut also. There was much emotional investment. Sonically – I was going for atonal walls of noise, drones and layers of static to offset the more immediate rich sounds. I did that with guitars also…pushing for a really hard sound against slow tempos within the space. Having said that the songs should be strong enough to work in a traditional context and almost everything was written at the piano.
Please explain the album’s rather magnificent cover!
I owe that to Matt (Canning) who does all of the art/illustrations for the album. We though it best to avoid tower images, so the idea was to create an image that positioned the viewer/listener in a high place. I couldn’t imagine this album/music with any other cover art. We really really pushed for great packaging and design.
