His latest writing collaboration with Daniel Wylie from Cosmic Rough Riders finds the Lancashire-based Bailey again soaking up the folk-rock and cosmic country psychedelia West Coast sounds of the late 60s, Alan Gregson dutifully supplying lap steel, dulcimer, clavinet and brass to complement Bailey’s 6 and 12-string guitars, piano and drums.
Thoughts of CS&N and The Byrds immediately come to mind with album opener ‘Rooks’, an anti-war protest jangler that sports such lines as “Kids at war are killed or maimed/By snipers or landmines/While kids their age are playing games/In towns they left behind/Meanwhile in the trenches/Fear floods the young man’s mind” and “Trigger happy lion tamer/We know who you are/It’s harder to accept a death/When killed by friendly fire/Their masters in their counting house/With profits getting higher”, brass delivering the “Ba, ba, ba, baaaa” refrain.
The pace slower with what sounds like the hollow sound of a ship’s horn opening the track before piano and picked guitar appear ‘I’ll Be There To Save You’ has a hushed delivery with an ambivalence to the lyrics which appear to be supportive (“A river runs right through this town/Who’ll survive and who will drown/I will never let you down/I am here to save you now”) but “Boats arriving cargo deep/Stolen goods bought on the cheap/Buy on any corner street” introduces black market shadows and the closing line “Voices calling ship to shore/Sailing off to sea once more/You won’t find an exit door” has an ominous air of exploitation and subjugation.
The longest track at over five minutes, the ethereally floating, strings-swathed ‘White Whale” is what it says on the tin, a love song to the Beluga “crashing through the deep blue… King of the ocean, queen of the sea”, appropriately leading into the equally shimmering, guitars and synths mesh of ‘Deep Blue Water’, the lyrics barely extending beyond the title and “Oceans of blue, guiding me, guiding you”. Returning to land, the fuzzily waltzing ‘New Year’s Eve 2010’ dips into turning of the year break-up lost love memories (“A building condemned and a person still living there too/Tired, exhausted and drowning in emotional confusion/I contrived to keep this love alive but I’m losing and I’m still trying work out where it went”).
One of three with desert in the title, ‘Desert Star’ is a surging instrumental with a churning guitar riff and Eastern vibes leading into ‘Welcome To The Desert’ with its shades of Blue Oyster Cult colouring echoes of CS&N and America in a psychedelic trip on “a highway through the night sky” and “lunar tides of love” with “dream coyotes howling loud”, with another unsettling undercurrent of indifference and apathy (“everyone’s pretending/There might be a happy ending now”). The desert where “the Cacti feed their souls” is also the setting for the cascading and echoey guitar notes of the Americana gothic ‘Never Read The Signs’, a steady walking drum beat carrying the spooked imagery of alienation (“Well I’m not from California/I’m a European man/And I know I don’t belong here/On this arid desert land”)
The cosmic country ‘Don’t Let The Garden Die’ is an metaphorical ecological plea for renewal (“Nature is a beautiful thing…Don’t let today go by and forget the beautiful things… just dig the ground around my friend and sow the seeds of new” and the hope that “every nation that you know/Could open up their hearts/And into this garden we’ll grow …And through these children’s eyes/There must be more that we can bring…To make this world sing”. And if the garden can’t survive then, it ends with ‘The Desert Could Be Mars’ imagining that, as the planet slowly dies (“The river ran until it ran away/The river bed is dry/The hot sun in the sky/The arid land is waiting/For the sun to light its fire”), planetary colonisation might be the only hope (“The furthest we can travel/Is a planet close to ours”), the line “There’s gonna be some life on Mars one day” doubtless one Elon Musk might wish to endorse.
While, beyond the cognoscenti, he remains largely under the radar, rarely playing live shows, Lost In A Sound,, in tandem with his previous releases, is an album that fully warrants a future Mojo career retrospective.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: www.facebook.com/Ianbaileymusicandinfo
‘White Whale’:
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