Wreck His Days Tomorrow The Rain Will Fall Upwards

An initially anonymous release on Blackest Ever Black in 2016 which was outed when Blackest Ever Black ceased to exist as being the work of JD Twitch. It sees a digital reissue on Optimo Music.

Credited contributions come from the likes of Conrad and Jonnine Standish (HTRK), Genevieve McGuckin and Lucas Santanna – and there is both deft sampling and extraordinary musicianship on display throughout, electronics and reverb the binding agents for exquisitely recorded cello, voices, piano, guitar, percussion.

It’s also a conference of ghosts: with references, some overt others oblique, to Les Baxter, Nina Simone, Roland S. Howard and Daevid Allen. It’s one who prefers to lose themselves in the collective, who believes in the advancement of the idea over the individual.

Recorded over the course of 2014-15, Wreck His Days is an explicitly political work, with a clear emphasis on socialist values, and moreover a belief in the international ideal: indeed, the closing ‘Rosa / Kollontai’ explicitly invokes the Internationale. Moreover, it was conceived as a work of hope and optimism, positing/encouraging a world that embraces difference and celebrating connectedness, a world that seems – in the (formerly) United Kingdom at least – to be rapidly vanishing. Recorded during Britain’s exit from the European Union, recent global events now cast a shadow over Wreck His Days, making its colours feel more muted. But this melancholy becomes it, and and perhaps pegs it unmistakably as a product of Britain, —and pastoral: in the albums more we’re reminded of Kevin Ayers, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Jan Steele.

Stylistically, it is impossible to pin down: the lambent, bittersweet piano chords and vocal loops of the title track splitting the difference between Balearic bliss-out and deep pools of melancholy, elegiac swells. ‘Ghost From The Coast’ is pantherish jazz noir with Jonnine Standish narrating a tale of “white studios” that house “the collective dreams of the entire world”. ‘...And I Tried So Hard’ is astral psychedelia, a quasi-symphonic that builds in an extraordinary celestial choirs. ‘Reverberasia’ builds a hulking, sub-heavy soundsystem weapon out of exotica samples, “Ay Carmela” takes one of the most famous Spanish Republican songs of the Civil War and gives it a sinister new momentum, with strident cello and ship-bell percussion dubbed into infinity.

This is the flipside of Wreck His Days more ethereal, fanciful moments: the sound of anger, railing at injustice, and to resist attack on the things we hold dear.

Kiran Sande 2016