JACK CHESHIRE, whose album Fractal Future Plays we were initiated into the mysteries of a few weeks back, has released the video for one of the standout tracks on an excellent set, “Miradors” – come watch.
We said of the album just ahead of its late November release: “Imagine, if you will, say, MGMT if they had spent less time in a brightly acid glimmer and maybe a little more stoned in summer hayfields.
“It’s not Robert Crumb melting-head psychedelic, like The Flaming Lips or The Red Krayola; it’s more in a fine line of bands who admit the psych to their blend, admire its cosmic clear sight rather than its sensual flood. Much if it has a song like ‘The Killing Moon’ as a sort of buried deep script; the romance, the seduction, the perfume of the other just behind the flimsiest curtain” (read our full review here).
“Miradors” takes a different tack to some of the tracks on Fractal Future Plays: it’s almost post-punk in its straight, declamatory, slightly alien lyrical delivery, crisp, almost with that so-British-as-not-to-be enunciation of Ray Davies: “I am the fat controller / Walk the corridors blindly,”, he narrates with an off-kilter crispness; “Luxury ghost flats line the streets … mine’s a golden ale and some mouthwash.” A “Mr Pleasant” for more dystopian times.
There’s talk of Tic-Tacs, sausage rolls, ghost flats; a kind of completely removed wonder at the absurdities of the everyday you also find in And The Native Hipsters’ “There Goes Concorde Again“. Retrotronica swoops and chatters, squelches and hurtles.
The cracking accompanying video shows Jack as a spasming businessman, utterly detached and alienated, adrift even in his home enviroment, the City.
This mirrors recent experiences of Jack himself, let alone Jack-as-narrator; “I increasingly felt as though I was an extra in an extended episode of Black Mirror. The world was going toxic and strange and it stirred up lots of cerebral sediment for me.
“There was a sheen of unreality to it that made me realise how complacent I’d been and how naïve I was. I found myself joking with friends; ‘we’ve gone down a dystopian wormhole, it’s not supposed to be like this.’
“It made me imagine multiple timelines playing out, fractals of various imagined or lost futures.”
You need any further convincing that Jack is a deep-thinking song-crafter with a British psych-folk vision you need to cop? Well, in the encomium of Lauren Laverne, there’s always the simple summation; she finds his canon “gorgeous and mindbending”.
Jack Cheshire’s Fractal Future Plays is out now on Loose Tongue on digital download, highly limited CD, and limited tangerine vinyl; order yours here.
Follow Jack at his website, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
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