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Dan Michaelson & The Coastguards

06.10.09

BIO

Dan Michaelson & The Coastguards is the new project from the voice of Absentee. Bringing together an unplanned but stellar line up, perhaps a more fitting title would be Dan Michaelson and Friends - but that’d be far too simple.

Recorded over two sessions at their spiritual home of The Premises studios in London (a solar powered studio in Hackney with Dan at the helm), Saltwater was pulled together by a wide keel of talented musicians, including members of Fields, Ed Harcourt’s band, Magic Numbers and Rumblestrips. With Icelandic Valgeir Sigurdsson (Bjork/Bonnie Prince Billy/ Nico Muhly) steering the production the final result was an album that, by turns, banks hard to the warm, misanthropic depths of The National’s The Boxer while maintaining the essence of jubilation at the act of creating music that made Absentee such a joyful listening experience.

This is the frame that much of Saltwater is built on, a sense of playfulness at the joy of making music, countered and darkened by Michaelson’s whiskey and cigarette cough of a voice and his talent for vocalizing the parts of a relationship that would usually prefer to keep themselves unsaid. The cruel asymmetry of romance is addressed exquisitely in intensely felt and sparsely drawn studies of the beginnings and ends of love: “you said you were leaving some clothes on the lawn, just until they’d dried…you say it’s easy to make things look hard / you were trouble form the start / so let’s make things hard” he rumbles on album opener ‘Ease On In…’ over brushed drums and mournful trumpets.

The album presents a combination of smart, laidback songwriting and a sense of languid grandeur that's upheld by the layers of a brass-strewn arrangement courtesy of the chaps from The Rumblestrips. To a great extent it’s the sound of “the Coastguards” which make Saltwater so inviting, perhaps most audibly on ‘Old Friends’ - a late-summer-smile of a track that owes it’s swing to it’s band-jam looseness – we can hear the simplicity of friends playing together in a room. Discussing the process, Dan said "If you listen, they're all just talking in the background" as well as making a record they're all friends hanging out, eating, drinking and inspiring each other – that’s what happened here. The Coastguards are all great friends that happen to be some of the players I respect the most, so why wouldn't we make a record together?"

Originally conceived as an attempt to re-address the bare bones of Dan's songwriting, avoiding the wryly humorous choruses and guitar solos that dominate his records with Absentee, he began working on the 'Saltwater’ sessions alone.

"The Coastguards allows me to think outside of Absentee, I can tell instantly whether a song would gain from the dynamics of Absentee or the "breathing space" and stillness that is a more Coastguards sound. Absentee takes a song and runs with it, Coastguards pitches the song up just enough to be heard."

The resulting album is a grand departure from Dan's previous recordings. With the original demos recorded on a cheap, suitably heartbroken, dusty, little out of tune piano, this time it's a more mellow, beautiful affair embracing the grace of Cat Power and that similar tenderness-brutality mix that Leonard Cohen does so well.

LISTEN

DAN MICHAELSON & THE COASTGUARDS - BUST