Review: Peaches Davenport - "The Ducks (A Snake In The Grass)

Peaches Davenport - The Ducks (A Snake In The Grass)
(Self-Released 2016)

Michigan's Peaches Davenport has proved a fixture on this blog since the 2014 release of THANK YOU JOB SQUAD - a patchwork effort of short, lo-fi vignettes ranging from itchy blankets of musique-concrete to the Elephant 6-inspired baroque pop of "Dog Hair Sweatpants", which topped my list of the year's best singles. The record was unstably dense, an infinite point of noise and compact melody threatening to implode, its glassy keyboard chords filling mixes like smoke rising to a ceiling while percussion clattered like dropped boxes of silverware. JOB SQUAD was dangerous, flammable and painfully pretty. 

Davenport's chosen successor to TYJS, titled The Ducks, is shockingly spacious in comparison, a pastoral landscape dotted with animal noises and delicate folk orchestration that forms a retroactive missing link between The Beach Boys' SMiLE Sessions and Animal Collective's Sung Tongs. "Frankie's Farm" acts as this album's version "Dog Hair Sweatpants", a frenetically played cut in the vein of Beirut around which the rest of the record orbits. Staccato staples of twangy acoustic guitar are fired into an overgrowth of poly-rhythmic percussion hammered out on laundry bins. Wordless vocal harmonies snake through the air like vines. It's a humid conservatory of abstract folk.

"Black Black Moon" is The Ducks' relatively conventional outlier. Peaches' vocals, (usually spookily similar to those of Of Montreal's Kevin Barnes), are pitched up to a phantasmically high octave, forming the eerie twee atmosphere that pervades much of Alex G's discography. It's like a haunted construction site, the whispers of this ghost choir echoing against a steely scaffold of acoustic fingerpicking that slowly crumbles into an outro of ambient ruins. Closing tune "Lemon Pink Bayou" might be the release's best, gloomily draping a veil of mandolin atop an amorphous piece for cello composed by Clark Pang. There's a cinematic sense of sense of despair that makes the song feel like a cliffhanger ending, leaving me wanting for yet another installment in the Peaches Davenport filmography. The Ducks is a polished follow-up to THANK YOU JOB SQUAD that holds firm to the project's fauvist pop ethos: whatever the opposite of a sophomore slump is, this is it.

Top Five Singles of 2014

5. Captive - "The Fool"
(February 2014 Self-Released)

"The Fool" is a harmonic convergence of all the elements that make the post-punk genre so attractive. Muscly snares, plated in industrial distortion and slicked with reverb usher in the track's driving rhythm section. A repetitious bassline, chugging along somewhere in between a hiss and a growl, sets the drum hits in motion as whirring synths and an acetic lead guitar riff join the fray. Working like clockwork, these elements of gothic pop all fittingly come together to supplement the song's mantra-like reflection on the natural order of the world. "First the Stone / Then the Plant / Animal, and then the Man". Something about the song and its timeless minimalism make it feel simple yet very fashionable, like a well-tailored Oxford.

For fans of: Blank Dogs, The Cure, Joy Division

4. A.G. Cook - "Beautiful"

(June 2014 PC Music)

If minimalism was a virtue that marked "The Fool", then so too is it the defining characteristic of A.G. Cook's "Beautiful", and just about all of the releases shelved alongside it in the PC Music discography. The difference is that while the former's minimalism highlights a feeling of bleak desolation, the PC Music collective uses that ethic to manufacture an aesthetic similar to that of a Wes Anderson film: pastel-toned, orderly and cozy, almost exaggeratedly so. Here, A.G. Cook's dream-poppy take on EDM lives up to its title, yet also feels just a little surreal, as if it were the background music in a Tim and Eric sketch. If anything, the track reaches uncharted territory in the dance music genre by stripping it back to its most basic roots.

FFO: Crystal Castles, SOPHIE

3. Institute - "Salt"

(August 2014 Sacred Bones)

Perhaps no single embodies the noisy, sinister vibe of the Sacred Bones label than "Salt", an amalgamation of hardcore punk and gothic pop in the vein of Misfits or Skeletal Family. The Texan quartet weaves gnarled riffage atop pummeling percussion, a suitable accompaniment for Moses Brown's signature growl, rabid and indecipherable.

FFO: The Men, Drunk Injuns, Black Flag

2. The Snow - "Memory Loss"

(April 2014 Captured Tracks)

It's a collaboration between members of Beach Fossils, Wild Nothing and Holograms - how could "Memory Loss" not make this list? The track, released on vinyl as a special Record Store Day exclusive, combines the best elements of each project involved: Beach Fossils' surf-y bass lines, Wild Nothing's jangling lead guitar and the angsty howl that Andreas Lagerstrom injects into Holograms' high-octane brand of post-punk. Together, they capture the sort of signature melodrama present almost universally throughout 80's music, whether it be on the radio or deep in the underground.

1. peaches davenport - "dog hair sweatpants"

(August 2014 Self-Released)

Taking influence from the shambolic brand of freak-folk popularized in the nineties by members of the Elephant 6 collective, peaches davenport is the brainchild of 15-year-old prodigy Cole Wharton. Nestled in the center of his project's surreal, highly experimental debut album  is "dog hair sweatpants", a breezy pop tune that sways back and forth clumsily on off-kilter rhythms as if it were a long-legged spider waltzing about on its spindly appendages. Acoustic guitar is percussively strummed to match the beat of the drums as they are consumed by brassy arrangements and bombastic keyboard melodies that remind me of the churchbells that can be heard in the distance on the hour while playing Animal Crossing for GameCube. Wharton's warbly vocal delivery reminds me of Kevin Barnes' in his early of Montreal discography. In its unabashed weirdness, the song is majestic, even anthemic. Rarely have I heard music this simultaneously alienating and inviting. 

Peaches Davenport - "THANK YOU JOB SQUAD"

peaches davenport - THANK YOU JOB SQUAD

(Self-Released 2014)

Though the album barely surpasses 22 minutes, Cole Wharton's debut effort under the pseudonym peaches davenport is an epic in its own right, an otherwordly work that claims possibly uncharted territory in the sphere of musical influence. There's certainly a cohesive aesthetic present throughout THANK YOU JOB SQUAD, it's just not one that's particularly classifiable. The album cover gives the listener a window into this reality. Wispy keyboards bookend the album, their tone a droney spin on the kitschy synths of an educational film meant to be shown in a physics classroom. They float lightly, but opaquely, they're dark clouds of ambient nothingness, reminding me of the Twin Peaks theme song, only more benign. There's no real sinister element to these pieces, composed solely of keyboard meditations and supplementary crackle. They just exist. They're atmospheric gases and the album inside is its own, weird little Edenic universe.

Though the album's instruments and elements of the songs themselves are pretty standard, I'm tempted to refer to THANK YOU JOB SQUAD as outsider art. There's meticulous, sometimes genius detail applied to the dizzying, offbeat energy that flows through the album. The arrangement of "Zounds! A Dog" is positively symphonic, the sort of care Kevin Barnes gives to each of his songs as of Montreal. Noise tracks like "Yoko" and "Ivan Hold Me" transition between the more accessible ones. The album is a surrealist dream that flows very well, but can be jarring in its obliqueness. The key to the album is "Dog Hair Sweatpants", a shambolic folk song that dances on a swaying rhythm, its brassy keyboards and breathy backing vocals making for a gorgeous and breezy tune that borders on bombast. If you respect the work of innovators like Dean Blunt and Sunset Rubdown, you'll fall head over heels for peaches davenport.