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It’s not unknown for musicians to produce their best work in their seventies or eighties – think the recent Tucker Zimmerman album, or the extraordinarily prolific output of Ed Askew, or even Shirley Collins’ late flourish – but it’s comparatively rare for an artist to kick off their career when they already have something like seventy years on the clock. This is what happened with Johnny Coley, who brought out his first record – 2021’s Antique Sadness – at an age when most people are collecting a pension. And what a record it was: a deeply experimental selection of spoken word pieces backed by weird jazz, uncanny electronics, chalkboards and transistor radios.
Another album, Landscape Man, followed a year later: here, Coley delved further into abstraction, explored longer forms, and generally let his astonishing, poetic mind go wherever it wanted to. Earlier this year, he published a book called Huron, a novel written entirely on his phone, which draws from the traditions of high modernism and stream-of-consciousness literature to create a mini-epic of queer American metaphysics. Now, with his creative stock as high as it has ever been, he is releasing what might be his most ambitious and rewarding project yet.
On Mister Sweet Whisper, Coley teams up once again with the band Worst Spills, stalwarts of the Sweet Wreath label, and together they set about creating six long-form avant-beat lyrical improvisations set to shimmering, Lynchian lounge-folk. Jacquie Cotillard’s keys and Joel Nelson’s guitar on opener They’re Dreaming Me recall Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger’s work on Riders On the Storm, but Coley’s frazzled observations are way more interesting than Jim Morrison’s often laboured attempts at poetry.
Club Roma sets up a framework of kitschy exoticism with Jasper Lee’s vibraphone and Ryan Jones’ upright bass. It balances Coley’s timeworn voice perfectly and uncannily. A paean to some of Rome’s seedier nightspots with a cameo from the Pope, it provides an unexpected juxtaposition: divine glory seeping into the earthly grime.
Coley’s poetry often fixates either on the bodily realities of being human or on the psychic or metaphysical symbols that have grown up around the American dream and the American landscape. Flesh Vehicle unites both of those themes. Here, the music is a decaying drone augmented by percussive plinks, occupying the grey area between human and machine. A stuttering guitar claws its way into the tune. Lee’s vibes offer a kind of melodic hope. Eerie or foreboding or strangely welcoming landscapes are traversed – an abandoned golf course, a road reclaimed by foliage. A car comes to life, metal turning to meat. It’s a vision of an America turned inside out, but against all odds, Coley’s world is not unpleasant or pessimistic: there is a vibrancy and a joie de vivre to his world, which belies his world-weary delivery.
A simple two-note bassline and some distant cymbals introduce That Knock At the Door, creating a sense of cinematic suspense, but the lounge-jazz vibes and Coley’s grainy, elemental recitation, with its appeal to a wonderful but strange sense of calm, make you realise that there’s something more meaningful and nuanced going on here than the horror-noir backdrop suggests. When Coley’s voice drops to a whisper and he intones, ‘I wanted to be alone, I wanted to be by myself’, we begin to see into the mind of a narrator simultaneously tormented and placated by memory.
The most obvious appeal to American landscapes and American culture comes in the form of Hitchhikin’, as Coley relates a tale of Dunkin Donuts and dodgy lifts before a kind of Sun Ra clatter-jazz breakdown topples the song into a moment of epiphany as the early-morning travellers witness a miraculous flock of geese. Dancin’ Like an Assassin welds propulsive latin jazz to a story of stripping, ‘dancing naked, with my… castanets.’ Point of view is everything here: Coley is the stripper, and then he is ‘a kind of potted plant’ that moves around on the tables, shedding petals. The ostentatious performer and the quiet observer, inhabiting different bodies and different states. This, like the rest of the album, could only have been made in America, but it is an America subverted, queered from the inside, ribald, rebellious and gleefully contorted. We often talk about songwriters being ‘the poet of this’ or ‘the laureate of that’, but Coley is a genuine poet, someone with things to say that haven’t been said before. With Mister Sweet Whisper, he has created a document of a crazy, frayed civilization and has made it sound beautiful.
Mister Sweet Whisper (15th November 2024) Mississippi Records/Sweet Wreath.
Bandcamp: Mississippi Records / Sweet Wreath
Deluxe LP jacket with artwork by Johnny, includes 4-page booklet with additional poetry and art, pressed on heavy black vinyl at Smashed Plastic in Chicago. Edition of 500, co-release with Sweat Wreath.
Read an interview with María Barrios at Mississippi Records here.
