(2022) Ben Woods - Dispeller  


Review:
An impressively strong lyricist, Ben Woods is, at heart, something of a singer-songwriter in the classic pop sense. The songs on Dispeller are written for voice and guitar or voice and piano, and played straight, they would be just fine – pretty great even. Take ‘Trace Reel’ for instance, a jaunty, piano-led number that flirts with the saloon. It’s an outlier on the record – the most broadly appealing, most accessible track here, with Woods’s honeyed croon on full display, a comparatively upbeat vibe, and a lightly psychedelic guitar finale. It’s properly catchy, not hard at all to imagine cued up on an NPR playlist, and one of only two uptempo numbers on the LP (the other is the deeply unhinged ‘Speaking Belt’, featuring the inimitable Alastair Galbraith.) But even here there’s also a clearly audible insectoid buzz running under most of the track, and beneath that guitar solo? What sounds like a piano being brutalised by man and reverb. Those unexpected touches create a sort of internal opposition within the track, elevating it beyond something easily slotted into an MOR drive-time radio hour. It becomes something other, which is pretty much the story of this album. In any case, one might’ve expected ‘Trace Reel’ to be Dispeller’s lead single, but it wasn’t. That single was the haunted, haunting ‘Hovering at Home’, a bit of slow Southern gothic by way of NZ. Built on Woods’s voice and a simple guitar figure – itself adorned with an audible click, likely an artefact from the recording process many would have discarded – the track is most of all a showcase of tape noise and manipulation and the interplay between that and more traditional instrumentation, culminating in a sort of face-off between warbling static and hiss and Memphis-y horns. It is decidedly less marketable than ‘Trace Reel’, but it’s also much more indicative of the space both Woods and Dispeller occupy as artist and album, respectively. It’s an interesting space, for sure, somehow accommodating the traditional and forward thinking, the open-armed and bloody-minded, and doing so in a way that seems unforced and organic. Rarer still is an indie rock recording with such a clear understanding of and appreciation for the bass drone, for the power of the sub. Dispeller, it turns out, is a subtle window rattler. Still, this isn’t a heavy record in the doomy, Sabbath-ian sense of the word – a good thing, as that wouldn’t suit it much. Nor is bass always or even usually a rhythm-enabler – these songs are often far too slow for that. Instead, it is frequently a drone-deployer and atmosphere-thickener, aural corn starch for the jus of the room. Which isn’t to say it’s incidental or unnecessary in such instances. Far from it. When it rumbles in on, say, opener ‘Fame’ or album highlight ‘White Leather Again’ you feel it, and it feels great. When it does provide some rhythmic sauce, as on ‘Wearing Divine’’s strange-o, slo-mo riff on ‘Crimson and Clover’, it grooves in a slinky, cheek-to-cheek sort of way. Again, feels good. Nothing is superfluous, from tape choirs to radio chatter, everything is utilised to its full potential in the service of getting you, the listener, where Woods wants you to go. — Quietus


   


Track List:
01 - Fame
02 - Trace Reel
03 - The Strip
04 - Teething
05 - Speaking Belt
06 - Hovering at Home
07 - Wearing Divine
08 - Punishing Type
09 - White Leather Again


Media Report:
Genre: dream-pop, indie-rock
Country: UK
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits


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