Adam Donen and The Drought – As Our Parents Slowly Turn To Clay

Adam Donen is clearly not given to understatement. A limited edition run of this debut album with the musically multi-skilled The Drought comes inside a 32 page booklet with the lyrics set out as poetry, complete with two pages of acknowledgements and seven of biographical introduction, the story the latter paints seeming to take up the cudgels on behalf of a Samuel Taylor Coleridge or Thomas de Quincey classical writing lineage. In precis: Donen previously led the Alexandria Quartet, whose The Daydreams of Youth EP Rich Hughes gave 80% to on here last December. By this time Donen had suffered a breakdown at which the band "dissolved by accident", embarking instead on a feverish period of self-medication and prolific automatic writing for what he saw as his epitath. "The line between life and literature is blurred if not entirely nonexistent" the text nonchalantly states, followed soon after by an assertion that in time the lyrics will be seen as "at least as good as any poems produced by our generation".Lesser men would spy the glib spectre of Johnny Borrell at this point and flee. Luckily, that previous band's wide ranging ragged folk-rock has not only been refined but been added to by judicious strings and a better idea of where to extract the best dynamic from in this homespun grandiose set-up. They can do the the Fatima Mansions recalling, intensely cathartic howl at society of 'Five Minute Zeitgeist', which survives from the Alexandria Quartet along with its agenda setting central line "I'm here tonight 'cos the zeitgeist couldn't be bothered", and they can also pull off more intimate songs like 'Ketamine', 'Bridges And Crags' (dedicated to Joanna Newsom in the booklet) and the acoustic guitar picking and subtle violin-backed 'Marlborough Avenue Elegy', which teeter on the edge and broods over love and personal depravity. 'Shoreditch Shuffle' whirls like the Waterboys, but it's virtually ground to dust by 'Ganesh Whose Trunk Wipes Away Trubba (Plays Dice in the Abyss of Infinity)', which overcomes both its cumbersome title and a female chorus of "trunkedy trunkedy trunkedy trunk!" as it furiously evokes a showdown between the Hindu deity and John the Revelator, the traditional author of the Book of Revelation evoked in a commonly covered American folk song, as an allegory for religion, right wing politics and commodification. What's particularly impressive in this context is how it doesn't sound like a random jigsaw of styles at all but all of one piece and voice.The immediate comparison that comes to mind is that of Nick Cave, similarly a troubled and often darkly poetic preacher who could rail against the world or try to take it into his arms, while musically there's echoes of the Bad Seeds, but also the pissed off ambition of the much undervalued 90s Irish band Whipping Boy and latter day British Sea Power's offbeat wide scope. Perhaps the more telling comparison, especially apparent on the likes of 'Nostalgia (Camden Road)', would be with Leonard Cohen's often introspective, ambiguous and occasionally black humoured monologues. It's Cohen, a well regarded poet for nearly a decade before moving to America to follow his singer-songwriter ambitions, who Donen more succinctly takes after, an irked poet dealing with big themes of love, society, religion, politics who found a musical form to express himself better and possibly to a bigger audience, forming the inventive arrangements around him without losing sight of putting the words in the centre but not overwhelmingly so. In its own way, As Our Parents Slowly Turn To Clay is a remarkably assured achievement. 85%mp3:> Adam Donen and The Drought: 'To Autumn'Adam Donen and The Drought on Myspace