Texas professor finds valuable lessons in everyday experience.
Back in ‘Hunky Dory’ days, David Bowie described Bob Dylan as having a voice like sand and glue. That phrase comes to mind on first hearing Sean Keel’s ‘ferals welcome’, where the semi-spoken lyrics rasp like a five-barred gate. With their titles all in lower case, the songs tell of people and places from the mid-west to the Texas hill country outside Austin, home of the university where Keel is an accomplished professor of mathematics.
Rated by his students as a gifted but demanding teacher, his creative juices have got to work using the raw materials that a life well-lived will provide. Drawn from memories and observations spanning his sixty-odd years, there’s tales of family and friends, told with the same acute attention to detail as might be found in any of his papers on algebraic geometry.
This is a man with something to say and the determination to say it out loud, no matter that his presbyphonia makes him sound like his vocal chords have been warmed up on a cheese-grater. It’s a style that takes a little getting used to, with Sean Keel often sounding more like Sean Dyche in a post-match interview, but the spare arrangements help Keel get his message across. Acoustic guitars, piano and upright bass leaven the mix, hints of Erik Satie and Scott Joplin assisting his tremulous vibrato in ‘square de vert’ and ‘angelus’. In a contemplative duet with Austin writer Jack Corcoran, the two men exchange campfire philosophies, wondering “what we smell like to spiders”. Occasionally reminding one of the whimsical Ivor Cutler, the mood comes closer to the nostalgic spoken observations of Van Morrison’s ‘Coney Island’.
Texas has produced more than a few writers with a gift for finding universal truths in the everyday and Keel has certainly staked a claim to join their pantheon. This is his second release on Icons Creating Evil Art and it’s good to see how this Swedish label is supporting new artists, even those as venerable as Keel. Carl-Marcus Gidlöf takes credit here, investing in Keel’s 2022 label début ‘A Dry Scary Blue’ and now this second collection, both records produced by multi-instrumentalist Gabriel Rhodes, the son of Kimmie and frequent producer of alt-country music royalty.
Essentially a series of lyrical musings set to a musical backdrop, ‘ferals welcome’ is a little out of the ordinary but with its emotional depth and intellectual heft there’s plenty here to contemplate.
6/10? Did the reviewer really listen to this record? Melon, Spiders, Laurentian Divide, In her Bruised Hands, If you’ve seen one fall, Angelus. Check them out yourself and try to think of any folk artist writing songs this good.