Full Album Premiere & Review: UWUW, UWUW
[Click play above to stream UWUW’s self-titled debut in full. Album is out tomorrow, Oct. 21, on We Are Busy Bodies.]
UWUW — said like “you-you” — operate as the base-trio of drummer/percussionist Jay Anderson (Lammping, ex-Comet Control, etc.), guitarist/vocalist/keyboardist/producer Ian Blurton (Ian Blurton’s Future Now, C’mon, so many others) and bassist/keyboardist Jason Haberman (The Wooden Sky, Yaehsun and others), but by the time you’re three seconds into “Scattered Ashes,” which opens their four-song self-titled debut full-length, they’ve already revealed themselves as more. The record begins in casual-cool motion, drums and bass with a groove out for the first of many walks to be taken in the relatively short half-hour span of the proceedings, and the guitar, bass and drums are almost immediately joined by a horn arrangement specifically geared to capture the feel of psychedelic soul and hard funk as portrayed by James Brown circa Hot Pants, earliest Parliament, The Temptations‘ Psychedelic Shack and any number of other Norman Whitfield productions of the era 1968-’72.
Utilizing two guest singers in Chris Cummings — who bookends on “Scattered Ashes” and the more disco-minded finale “Box Office Poison” — and Drew Smith, who takes on the 13-minute cosmic funk epic “Staircase to the End of the Night” and the subsequent cooler-than-all death blues “Landlord,” as well as sax by Jay Hay (who handled the horn arrangements throughout), trombone by Tom Richards and trumpet by Patric McGroarty, UWUW‘s UWUW is a tapestry of overlapping trippy, progressive and soulful, melodic songcraft.
With a sound further fleshed out by various comings and goings of synthesizer and effects, as the background of “Scattered Ashes” also demonstrates, there’s a world being created here not entirely separate but nonetheless distinct from the homage to nostalgic Toronto that Lammping make their own — Anderson is the right drummer for the job and proves it here on the hi-hat alone, never mind the rest of the kit and hand percussion, etc. — as UWUW draws directly from classic funk and soul music. Even in the midsection guitar space-out of “Scattered Ashes” or the ultra-flowing slow-motion dreamscapery of “Staircase to the End of the Night,” the rhythm holds, and it is there that the band’s process of building upward from initial guitar-bass-drum jams is revealed.
With Blurton doubling as producer for the material, there’s a smoothness to the overarching sound of the album that is very much his, but the effect of layering together these pieces, one thing on top of the other, then mixing them all together to come across as organically as they do, is a masterclass in modernizing retroism. “Staircase to the End of the Night,” with its repetitive guitar line, righteous shifts from verse to chorus, hypnotic repetitions early manipulated by effects, and outward direction takeoff after about six and a half minutes in — you’ll recognize it when the percussion starts in over the drums — horn solo, crash, return, shimmy, drift, and eventual wash of melody before returning to the lyrics, “Holding me up and holding me tight/The staircase will run to the end of the night,” is and should be an obvious focal point. It takes up nearly half the album’s runtime, and feels very much like UWUW claiming territory now to advance future exploration; or maybe that’s just me thinking wishfully.
The sleek delivery of Smith on “Staircase to the End of the Night” underscores another point working in UWUW‘s favor, which is that the abiding fluidity of the production plays a role in uniting the songs as they operate with different moods and players. Yes, the horns appear on each track, and it’s only two singers, both male, and so on, but there’s no question UWUW operates in varied spaces, as the turn from “Staircase to the End of the Night” to “Landlord” and “Box Office Poison” on side B readily shows. The songs simply do different things and go different places — and that’s not to leave out “Scattered Ashes” either, with its surprisingly grim lyrical theme mirrored in “Landlord.”
Starting with the most gradual ascent of a fade-in here-present, the track opens at a markedly languid tempo; fittingly dreamy coming out of “Staircase to the End of the Night” but sweeping suddenly into its verse, with Smith reminding a bit as he did the song before of Sean Lennon in The Claypool-Lennon Delirium, but making a point of its tension in the verse line before the chorus arrives to mellow-strut and unfold its lysergic reach of melody, bringing in ethereal and funky keys before heading back into the verse for another round. They go back again to it to finish, but most of the second half of the track is given to the chorus and a post-chorus jam, which is not at all a complaint. The rhythm holds the underlying movement as the keys, guitar and vocals offer breadth that would in many less-skilled hands be contrasting the structure but here reaffirms it, and so the final turn is masterful instead of clumsy like so much else of UWUW‘s let’s-try-it-and-see-what-happens-hey-we-made-a-song moments.
And the tambourine and keyboard — never mind the bass; oh, the bassline — announce the arrival of “Box Office Poison,” which offers a standout hook even in the face of “Scattered Ashes,” “Landlord” just prior and “Staircase to the End of the Night.” With Cummings stepping back in on lead vocals, there’s a sense of unity with the beginning of the record that comes through even if you don’t know the personnel involved, but an immediately full arrangement is practically beating you over the head to get out to the dance floor. Where is the dance floor? And why are we dancing? Because it’s the end of the world, and that’s what’s happening. The clever engagement with popular culture in the lyrics suits the shimmer of the keyboard, and Anderson and Haberman once again leave no doubt as to where the soul in soul music is modeled.
They cap with a big swell in the horns riding the groove at half-time — prog heads will hear King Crimson there; I’m not sure it’s intentional and I’m not sure it’s not — and finish their debut album with a six-minute track that sounds like it only took three; pretty emblematic of the listening experience as a whole. These are busy players with musical lives outside this outfit, so I will not attempt to predict what they might do from here or when, but Blurton, Haberman and Anderson — with Hay, Cummings, Smith, Richards and McGroarty — find an immediate niche for themselves on ground few others could so successfully tread, and with songwriting at the core of what they do, manifest a work of gorgeous, lush heavy soul.
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