Dave Cloud comes packaged as some sort of genius, albeit a dead one. RIP Dave Cloud.
If you really want to know what he sounds like then you should stop reading this review and buy the album because it is a stone cold classic. Initially I thought it was a compilation due to the fact that it has twenty-seven tracks, but it turns out this is the last album he recorded before passing away earlier this year.
Dave Cloud also comes packaged as lurking somewhere between Captain Beefheart, Roky Erikson and Tom Waits but to these ears (apart from maybe Roky) those comparisons seem somewhat wide of the mark and perhaps even misleading? Imagine if Bruce Springsteen wasn't such a smug, boring git and managed to unconstipate himself for a short while? Imagine if the E Street band weren't sad, desperate musos and instead were a bunch of gifted goofballs? Well then, just maybe, he might sound like Dave Cloud. For future reference if you want to torture me then buy me a Bruce Springsteen concert ticket and if you ever want me to torture myself then buy me a ticket for the last great Dave Cloud gig in the sky and I will crawl over broken glass to be there.
I don't mention Bruce Springsteen for no good reason. Tracks like 'Never Say You Come From Nowhere', 'Soixante Neuf' and 'Cookie Crumbles' sound like 'Born To Run' oughta sound if it wasn't trying so hard to come from the great American song book. Dave Cloud was clearly an idiosyncratic performer.
The first thing you notice about him, besides the fact that he sounds like he is taking a dump whilst delivering his vocal part, are his brilliant lyrics. The clever part is that they are heavily disguised as rubbish rhymes. Then you go back and listen again and you realise that it must have taken a good dollop of cracked genius to come up with them. "Thieving love bandit/You took my love and you planned it/Maybe someday when you and my wife start to swing/I'll be invited as a part-time thing".
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There are many examples of this throughout the album and they are often part of what you might call a love song or perhaps, ode to woman. Sometimes they are lewd but they are 'real' and there is definitely a lot of love for the opposite sex. In terms of the music there is a great scuzzy, fuzzy garage band laying tracks down for Dave to wander all across the top of.
There is also an element of surf in the sound but what comes across most of all in every single one of these tracks is 'joie de vivre'. We all value different things in life but all too often it has gone in a flash and we are left wondering what it was all about. I don't think Dave Cloud was in any doubt. Wine, women and song all the way, so good people it is time to drink up and be merry, whilst listening to the sounds of Dave Cloud and The Gospel Of Power. Amen to that.
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