Every artist should go through a muppet phase (or embrace their muppety-ness if it is their de facto voice). Kevin Ayers, my current and perhaps forever obsession, has many muppety moments on each of his sublime first six albums. His is an endearing and idiosyncratic delivery, and that aspect has contributed to him becoming one of my favorite vocalists.
Bob Dylan went through a muppety phase. Nashville Skyline era Dylan is full on muppet. And how great is that? Pretty undeniably so.
Karen Dalton…muppet. My point being that the term is not derogatory but an accolade (of the highest order). Jim Henson’s voice is pure muppet. He, the progenitor, didn’t alter his tone and timbre when it came to voicing his puppets, he infused his creations with an authenticity born of his own natural voice, and the result was a kind, sincere, whimsical, and authentic series of performances beloved by millions.
Ned Collette has a muppety voice. He, too, breathes sincerity, whimsy, and authenticity into his creations. His creations just happen to be songs. Which brings us to Mixed Light, his latest offering (and the only one I’ve ever heard). Don’t be mad at me for having disappeared from music for nigh on twenty years. Shit happens. Part of that shit means not having heard about Ned Collette. But here I am, ready to sing his praises.
Mixed light is consistent in its beauty. Consistent in the way each song unfolds like a dense novel spread open on your lap after, having read for hours, you’ve drifted off, transported into the world of dreams. I try to follow Collette’s lyrics, but I am endlessly distracted by the epic swell of his sonic narratives. Words and phrases pop out to me, but I can’t help but dream my way through these eleven songs.
The question is, how do I describe a cohesive album made of disparate parts? What does that even mean? Well, Mixed Light is warm, and somewhat melancholy. Consistently so. It also stretches out in ways that are sometimes jazzy and other times cosmic, but never so much that things get hokey or cliched or disinteresting.
Riffing on a theme can and often does go horribly wrong, but Collette’s vision, and the acumen of his players, keeps things succinctly on track. Every note, no matter how “out”, buttresses the central concept. So when “Paper Night” explodes into a jazz frenzy, the resulting effort is pure bliss.
Does the term jazz throw you? Don’t let it. It’s one thing to play jazz (not a bad thing…hello…*Magma* fan here) and another to have a jazzy bent every so often. Colette lets the songs guide him. At times he is pure folk (“In the Kitchen”), at others, a hybrid of easy listening and country (“The Light is Growing Old”), and still others, Hawkwind. No joke.
“Nothing Rare” begins as a trancey, repetitive pop-adjacent number that quickly morphs into a wah-filtered space-rock freak-out akin to what one might find on In Search of Space or Doremi Fasol Latido. That is, until it shifts gears abruptly into something altogether surrealist, mad-cap, and distinctly other.
Colette, in essence, keeps you on your toes, and jazziness is a part of that agenda. So is inviting the remarkably talented and utterly charming Leah Senior to provide second vocals to a string of ineffably catchy songs that make you want to dance, hug people, sing along, and write your own damn songs.
Colette, if you haven’t guessed, is a master at his trade, and, it would seem, at peak power. Again, I haven’t heard what’s come prior, but can it be any better than this? I guess I’m going to go and find out.
