Australian refugee Joe McKee could do worse than sow the seeds of his dream in the footsteps of John Grant, a man whose phoenix-like career renaissance in the last five years has been little short of phenomenal.
Like Grant’s long and ultimately fruitless shift in Czars, here was a man who’d been part of a band – Snowman – which had found sales far harder to come by than good reviews. Both have sought reinvention as solo artists away from the musical yelps of their former colleagues. From that point, though, comparisons become less clear.
Left to fate McKee’s story could still clearly go either way, in so much as ‘Burning Boy‘ is as bigger risk, as out of time, as imprecisely beautiful as Grant’s stunning ‘Queen of Denmark‘, heralding potentially similar implications for its creator.
Following ‘Absence‘ – Snowman’s final outing recorded after the band had relocated to London – McKee told the world prophetically that he, “Didn’t want to scream anymore”. Evidently the result of a much needed catharsis, ‘Burning Boy’ is a collection of crafted songs that prefers to give up its secrets more gradually than the more didactic gestures of his previous band. With his voice little more than a whisper through most of it, almost dreaming awake, the singer is on a journey that it’s apparent right from the start he feels is some kind of appointment with destiny.
It’s fair to say that Snowman made music which sounded like some of its titles read – ‘Daniel Was A Timebomb‘, ‘We Are The Plague‘ – but here the shift to greater lyrical dexterity is matched by similarly arid labels such as ‘An Open Mine‘, ‘Flightless Bird‘ and ‘An Unborn Spark‘. The first of those is as close as McKee comes to walking in the sunlight; a gently plucked guitar and throwaway Sixties ennui only gradually swept away towards the end by a burst of nervous energy. Less effusive, ‘The Garden‘ slows the pace down to a torpor; the words feel like they come from some elaborate maze, whilst Matthew Guest‘s piano chimes give the impression they’re being played in a room a thousand miles away.
McKee has been compared to the similarly baroque and latterly MOR Scott Walker, but the reality is a little more complicated. Within ‘Burning Boy’s darker side – most eloquently articulated on the slightly morbid ‘Golden Guilt‘ – there are shades of Matt Johnson‘s grim and similarly entitled odyssey in paranoid self obsession ‘Burning Blue Soul‘. At the end of the spectrum farthest from that obsessive paranoia, the sparsely arranged but string-laden romanticism of opener ‘Lunar Sea‘ could be a fireside out-take from Aztec Camera‘s toothsome début ‘High Land, Hard Rain‘ – a release similarly shored up by wistful timelessness.
As it progresses the singer’s invocations to becoming marooned from modern life sound more and more like a wish rather than a nightmare, and it’s this dislocation which becomes almost intoxicating, a sensation like holding hands with a ghost. When he turns round, Joe McKee may no longer still be there in the mirror.
But that always presupposes that he ever wanted to be found.