www.whelanslive.com
presents
DAVID TURPIN
+Hunter-Gatherer &
Sarsparilla
Sunday 18th
April
Whelan’s, 25 Wexford St,
8pm
Tickets €12 plus booking fee
available from WAV [lo-call 1890 200 078], www.tickets.ie, Ticketmaster outlets nationwide, City Discs
and Road Records
Whelanslive.com
are proud to present experimental electronic pop artist DAVID TURPIN in Whelan’s
on Sunday 18th April. Support on the night comes from the magnificent
Hunter-Gatherer and the equally magnificent
Sarsparilla.
David Turpin’s first
album, the stark, secretive The Sweet Used-to-be, was among the best-reviewed
Irish debuts of 2008. Now he returns with Haunted! Earning its exclamation
mark with 11 boundlessly inventive, sparklingly melodic songs, Turpin’s
sophomore offering is the Oz to his debut’s Kansas.
This is a record in love
with the possibilities of pop music, taking the listener on a ghost train ride
through an eerie interior expanse populated by dancing skeletons, magical
animals and celestial bodies. The conventional subject of carnal desire is
conspicuous by its absence, and yet the world of the album remains a genuinely
tender-hearted one, as the excision of the libidinous allows other forms of love
– platonic, commemorative, anthropomorphic – to ripple to the surface. The
result has the conceptual rigor of Laurie Anderson, the open-hearted
experimentation of Arthur Russell, and the oddly soothing spookiness of The
Cure.
Drawing upon a set of
songs largely whipped up in eerie isolation at the foot of Co. Carlow’s
Blackstairs
Mountains, Turpin embarked
on an 18-month recording process that saw him piece the album together at his
own home and in a succession of other recording environments. The end result is
seamless, bound together by Turpin’s own meticulous production and luscious
co-production and mix work by Stephen Shannon.
Throughout, endlessly
inventive settings are located for Turpin’s singular gossamer murmur. Perhaps
most unexpectedly of all, he has let his fascination for early hip-hop and
modern R&B run riot with a block party’s worth of strutting drums, disco
fingersnaps and live percussion. According to Turpin, “It made sense to bring
the rhythms to the forefront, as the album is on a spooky theme, and rhythm is
the skeleton of a song”.
Immediate standouts
include the infernally catchy single ‘The Bone Dance’, the surprisingly beefy
‘Heart-beep’, and the indescribable ‘Dorothy Gale’, a Muchkin-led electro gospel
congregation unlike anything on Earth. Elsewhere, the velvety opener ‘Cowards
Bend the Knee’ updates the sound of Turpin’s debut with a fresh arsenal of
layered vocals and live instrumentation, while ‘King of Swords’ embellishes the
cavernous click-thump of R&B with Arthurian allusions and medieval
flourishes. The greatest sonic extremes of the album are represented by ‘The
Skeleton Key’ – which corkscrews into the memory with savagely intricate sliced
vocals and an immediately memorable voodoo taunt of a chorus – and ‘Hymn to the
Lighthouse’, a startlingly delicate closing song built around a gentle rhythmic
pulse created from the crunch of seashells underfoot. The emotional peaks,
meanwhile, are the numinous ‘Melmoth’ – in which a lone vocal builds to a
rousing mini-epic co-starring the hounds of hell – and the shimmering showtune
‘Nightlights’, in which Turpin squares up to the loss of a loved one with grit
and empathy.
A stellar firmament of
contributors appear in support, with Conor O’Brien of Villagers guesting on the
cryptic ‘Polar Song’ (and playing guitar on four further songs) while Cathy
Davey materialises on the mysterious and expansive ‘The Red Elk’, a narrative
song about a pact with an otherworldly animal. The album’s swelling strings
come from Cora Venus Lunny, who contributed up to 60 layers of violin and viola
apiece to seven songs.
Haunted! is a record that has no time for
blustering state-of-the-world addresses or ersatz singer-songwriter
confessionals, and yet it is as personal a statement as anybody will make in pop
this year. As Turpin tells it, “The record takes place in an imaginary world,
and what could be more intimate than revealing something that’s wholly
imaginary?”
David Turpin and his
live band launched Haunted! with
a free, invitation-only performance at the Hugh Lane
Municipal Art Gallery,
Dublin, on
October 9, 2009. Turpin was the first pop musician ever to play in the
gallery’s Sculpture Hall.
Here are some
complimentary things that people have said about David Turpin and 'Haunted!':
"4/5 - A very fine record indeed" - Hot Press
"Scarily good" -
The Star
"4/5 - Distinctive and sophisticated [...] Possessed of a
beautifully dry wit" - Sunday Business Post
"Deliciously experimental
[...] quietly sensational" - AU Magazine
"Weird and wonderful [...] The
year's strangest electronic pop album" - Martin Burns, News of the World
"Highly original" - Tony Clayton-Lea, The Irish Times
"4/5 -
Surreal [...] Classy [...] Captivating" - Totally Dublin
"Highly
polished [...] Deliciously stylised" - Nick Kelly, Irish Independent
"4/5 - Unique... Turpin displays an uncanny ability to challenge the
listener" - eightball.ie
"Beautiful [...] as beguiling as the best of
2009" - RTE.ie
"A definite to feature in the top end of the Best Albums
of 2009" - Phantom 105.2 I-CON Album of the Month
"It was about time
somebody got around to making an Irish gothic synth-pop album" - Metro Albums of
the Year 2009
www.DavidTurpin.net
www.myspace.com/DavidTurpin
www.myspace.com/huntergathererforever
www.myspace.com/sarsparillamusic