#jdsimo

Shortcuts, excursions, detours and homecomings

SIMO’s fantastic debut Let Love Show The Way and their impressive show in Camden were right up Plunger’s street, with southern-laced psychedelia and jamming galore. Since then JD has undergone a radical makeover: the Haight-Ashbury Indian scarves, velvet jacket and flowing hair making way for a proto-quiff and On The Waterfront-leather-jacket-and-jean-turn-ups, perhaps indicating a new direction for the band…

…and Rise & Shine does stray down different paths, with an awful lot more gritty soul and funk vibes going on than before: from the gris-gris feel of Return with its spare finger-click-and-kick intro and falsetto vox, and the smooth, smoochy Pendergrass-soul of I Want Love, to the Meters-meets-Black Keys minimalist groove of People Say and The Climb’s tricksy off-kilter jazzy funk.

A lot of studio time was obviously spent creating dense soundscapes: the down-and-dirty lope of Meditation is drenched in backtracking, while JD’s vocal is given twin-track octave effects; on Shine (and elsewhere) it’s run through fuzzy harp mic distortion. Much of JD’s guitar sound (SFX notwithstanding) is old school twangsome 60s soul tones, although there is some flaring wah in Shine, and angry-wasp-in-a-jar frenzy on the grunge/hip-hop hybrid Don’t Waste Time. There are some nice touches of invention and imagination too, like the taped JFK speech on The Climb, and the surprise inclusion of a portentous Sabs riff interspersed in I Want Love, as well as an eerie carnival midbreak and multi-layer a cappella close.

All intriguing stuff, but for Plunger the last four tracks are much more ‘our kind of thing’. Howling feedback introduces the scything chords and piledriving drum-and-bass onslaught of Light The Candle, with an extended, fearsome, spacey wig-out over complex switching round of rhythms and pace from Adam and Elad. Be With You’s Deadish high-tremolo noodly opening, with lazy hazy bass and drums, showcases JD’s drawled southern soul grit-and-power vox: a psychedelic mutli-layer gimlet-toned guitar maelstrom subsides into an echt  expressive bluesy break over stripped down backing, before a heartfelt soul-man rap builds over intensifying rhythms to a monster return of the maelstrom and a frenzied, stinging-slide close.

In keeping with the last album’s precedent there’s a mellower moment in The Light, a finger-picked back porch In The Pines-style spare melancholy unaccompanied blues, JD’s vocal an emotional breaking mumbled whisper, before the thirteen minute epic I Pray sees the band firmly back on home ground. A Norwegian Wood-meets-Dark Star hallucinogenic caravanserai meander with cymbal-rich loose drumming, mesmeric bass (and a very Morrisonesque spoken hippie lyric) cut through by a violent 11/8, speaker-swapping, chorus. Bubbling trippy bass and eastern-flavoured toms and cymbals back a discursive Jimi-cum-Jerry excursion, before trademark freeform rhythm-switch jamming, fast-to-slow. tricksy-to-basic, with JD now savaging his guitar, now swapping to delicate jazz tinged octaves and trills. A full-on “proper” tour-of-the-kit. all-around-the-beat, drum solo heralds the return of fiercer atonal flurries, the acerbic tone and speed increasing to a final ‘prayer’, reprised belligerent chorus and “Amen”. Stunning.

It’s good to see a band exploring new avenues, and even when you aren’t entirely sure where they lead SIMO are good enough to entice you down those byways with them. But it’s even better to find such a glorious homecoming at the end of the trip.

Rise & Shine is released through Mascot Label Group/Provogue on 15th September, and is available to pre-order now in various formats and bundles here: https://www.mascotlabelgroup.com/simo/ or from iTunes and Amazon.