If Peter Wilson blushes at descriptions of Songs From The Deep Forest as his debut record, you can put it down to more than just a paternal acknowledgement of last year’s Adventures In Gramophone.
Watching Wilson being paraded along the warped catwalk of the debutante cattle market (‘One To Watch’ in style supplements, blinking ads on the iTunes homepage, inclusion alongside The Guillemots in the – ahem – ‘new eccentrics’ movement) is an odd experience, not unlike seeing a mature student turn up to a bacchanalian fresher’s ball with an arm-full of library books.
We’ve come to know him, his dreads and his off-kilter way with a ballad, over the course of many, many moons; and along the way we’ve discovered that there’s something in his bearing that keeps Wilson at one remove from the hustlers of new meat.
Perhaps it’s because he’s a husband and father of three, or maybe it’s the old world/other worldly detours that his music is prone to investigate, from crackly antique record players to washboards to cheese-graters, but Duke Special – Wilson’s musical alter-ego – is a serious, grown-up and non-perishable persona. Because of this, Songs From The Deep Forest never once feels like an introductory mission-statement, or a record keen to force an exaggerated first impression on the listener. It’s so confident, accomplished and comfortable in its own skin that you feel like you’ve happened across a long-running serial that’s bubbling along mid-season.
That wise, wise woman Jill Scott once sang reassuringly that, “Sometimes we all have to swim upstream.” Despite its uplifting musicality (the melodic rush of opening track ‘Wake Up Scarlett’ is a terrific exercise in path-clearing), Deep Forest is a record with seriously wet hair.
Rufus Wainwright and Tom Waits are obvious, almost needlessly stated touchstones here; and while it’s true that Duke Special is never as stylistically audacious as the former, or as moon-howlingly poetic as the latter, he brings something else to the table: the pose of a struggling, honourably-intentioned, domestic Everyman. Struggling with love, struggling with temptation, struggling with a lack of faith, even, as evinced by the deceptively furious ‘Brixton Leaves’, struggling with his feelings for his hometown: “Our time has come?/Well fuck those fifes and damn those drums.”
And for someone with such an obvious love of theatrics, his willingness to juggle styles, instrumentation and production tricks means tracks like ‘Freewheel’ and ‘Portrait’ avoid sinking into lachrymose piano-schmaltz. His obvious faith in the power of melodious pop sees ‘Everybody Want A Little Something’ and his cover of the neglected Amazing Pilots’ tune ‘Slip Of A Girl’ take off into florid life.
If you are going to make a comparison, Harry Nilsson is perhaps the most apt. There are times here where the woozy joie-de-vivre of a track like ‘Salvation Tambourine’ threatens to take an unsettling turn, when Wilson manages to balance the whimsical and the worrying in a way that fans of John Lennon’s worst booze buddy will appreciate.
On the whole though, this is a defiantly celebratory record. And, thankfully, it’s a party we’ve all been invited to attend.