(from CWSY#5, March '01) / home / reviews index
Kirk Lake - 'Kirk
Lake' (dreamy)
He might be unable to come up with a title for his third album, but
here the London-based musician/author/artist gives us everything from
folk to jazz to "the end of music". Complete with interlude.
Serious but not especially gloomy, 'I'll Take It As Read' opens up like a Go-Betweens growing up in a rain-swept city rather than sunny old Oz, yet it's one of Lake's perkier songs. He'll breathe as if whispering compliments in a loved one's ear, but will tell the listener their achievements mean 'Nothing to No One'. On the morose 'Morphology', he'll warn amid loud bangs, whirrs and buzz that "Evolution sets you on extinction's path".
Lake does have a sense of humour - 'A Beautiful Ending' especially has some charmingly contrary lyrics - but it's a dark and sardonic one. 'Everyday Lingers' soundtracks our hero as he moseys down sleazy midnight streets, complete with sax solo mewling like the cat in the alley and a Nick Cave macabre fairground organ. And while most tracks would be at home in yr quality blues/folk club, 'The Adventures of an Abstract Detective' has no home on this Earth. And it was originally issued as a 3" CD inside a cardboard cube, complementing such other odd Lake limited editions as a cassette set in concrete and a DAT in a jar of oil.
Kirk Lake finds humour in the melancholic world of Tindersticks and Jack, and is happy to branch out not only with unplayable formats but with a hillbilly slow-hoe-down ('The Wedding Song') using whatever 'instruments' are to hand, and to bow out with 'the end of music'. Pretension? No, it's only the static at the end of the vinyl. Reproduced on CD. A comforting end to an enjoyably unsettling listen.
