flakebelly - Apprentice Green (Flaming Jangle Music)

Looking forward is obviously important; it always pays to see where you are going. But looking back, it can be a lot of fun, especially if you are doing so within your own music-making context. After all, how else can you judge just how far you have come as an artist? flakebelly took this idea further than most; rather than just bending his ear into his earlier work, he decided to take some of the first songs he ever wrote, a series of 20-year-old songlets and ideas, sonic sketches, and works in progress, and bring them to fruition and lay them down in his home studio, a sort of collaboration with his younger self. The result is the album before you, Apprentice Green.

It’s a mercurial blend of music, but mercurial is good, right? It suggests unexpected sonic mixes and musical mystique, artistic flights of fancy and musical exploration, which is precisely what you get here.

“TimeBomb” seems to drift into the public consciousness as the album opener, a dreamy blend of blissed-out folk and ambient pop, which is not exactly what such an explosive title suggests. But this is the world we find ourselves in. “Caution” is a strange mix of hazy, half-heard dream-jazz vocals and more strident grooves, “Plackwitch of the Bettigown” takes us into the same Lear-induced nonsense, sound-as-language territory as Lewis Carrol’s “Jabberwocky” and “Raggy Doll” is a fairy-tale/musical hall/indie-blues oddity.

Apprentice Green is a strange album, and I mean that in the very best of senses. The fact that these odd sonics and strange musical forms represent the first musical moves by an artist shows just what a singular vision they have, one undiminished by the pressures of fad or fashion. The fact that twenty years later, flakebelly is still pushing such beguiling and often baffling sounds shows just how true to that cause he still is.

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