We always think of “singer-songwriters,” for want of a better word, as being acoustic guitar-wielding troubadours, people who have carried the 60’s folk ethic into the modern era with, fundamentally at least, few changes. But of course, that is a naive view, because the likes of Johnathan Richman, Alex Chilton, and Tom Waits are also singer-songwriters, just ones who created their own path within such a genre. And so does Dame Haff
A play on his actual name, Dame Haff gives us his debut EP, four songs that blend quirk with quality, the melodic with the often melancholic, the harmonic with the humorous. With everything but Tom Marsh’s drums played by Dame Haff, there is an element of bedroom-pop about it, and I mean that in the best, lo-fi, DIY, authentic and honest…real, and real in ways that the over-polished, over-produced music of the big studio can’t get anywhere close to.
“Easy Lover” runs on an early-eighties alt-dance club pulse, but uses neat shifts in pace and dynamic lulls to shape the experience. “Brazil” is a postcard home from a gap year in that titular country, a drifting and reflective piece with a strange melancholy soaking through every musical pore.
“Wedding” is more of a groover, but of course, things aren’t as simple as that, and there is still that sense of underground post-punk dance-pop, the sort of thing that the ex-punks fashioned before the Blitz Kids turned that sound into the New Romantic sound and went overground.
And if you feel that by now you are getting a sense of what Dame Haff is all about, “Charlie’s Song” makes you think again, a strange blend of the motorik krautrock sound blended with B52’s and perhaps even a touch of the New York, No-Wave proto-punk sound of Suicide, and the overall result is disarming and unique.
I hope that if Dame Haff ever gets the budget to make music in a bigger studio, it doesn’t change his sound. What he has here, this beguiling blend of the understated and the over the top, of synths and guitars, analog and digital, sonic tradition and musical adventure, is perfect.
