Ordinary Lovers - Whatever You Need

Ordinary Lovers

Whatever You Need
self-released; 2014

4.2 out of 5 - TOP ALBUM

By J Simpson

Genres are becoming endangered species as they succumb to the post-modern meltdown, same as everything else, with every band being essentially a genre unto themselves, a confluence of all their ideas, influences and inspirations. And with the increased atomization and the specialization of sub-sub-sub-genres, it'd be easy to think they don't matter anymore. 

This simply cannot be true, however, as we live in a time with more and more music being made every second, being passed from hand to mouth to ear. We need a taxonomy to communicate and simply to recommend music we love to our friends and family (which has been the real story, all along). So while genres may be redundant and dismissive, they are also a necessary part of the culture surrounding music. 

Ordinary Lovers is the solo project of Perth, Australia's David Danzi, who took to working solo after too many flaky band encounters. Speaking about Whatever You Need, Danzi states, "it’s psychedelic! It’s pop! It’s blues! Call it whatever you want." Danzi didn't want to put restrictions on the music before it was created, instead focusing his time on writing songs and lyrics as it should be. What struck me, first and foremost, was the first word in that list, psychedelic. Sure, we all know what it means, automatically calling to mind paisley posters, incense, oil light shows, and of course, drugs. Lots and lots of drugs. 

When most people think of psychedelic rock, they tend to default to a kind of cartoonish parody of The Doors, The Grateful Dead, maybe Cream or Hendrix - you know the drill. There will be crying, screaming wah solos! There may be funky Farfisa organs, if the band happens to be drawing from Texas psychedelia. There may be loose jamming, some improvisation, an incorporation of non-Western elements. 

All of which is well and fine, but we must remember the original definition of psychedelic: "of or noting a mental state characterized by a profound sense of intensified sensory perception, sometimes accompanied by severe perceptual distortion and hallucinations and by extreme feelings of either euphoria or despair," as well as "resembling, characteristic of, or reproducing images, sounds, or the like, experienced while in such a state." 

One wonders how intense and disorienting an experience may be, if you've encountered it a thousand times before. Danzi reminds us with Whatever You Need that while genres may be becoming redundant, they still have power. They still occupy psychic space in our heads, and when you hear those flying wah solos, those burning organs, you might just flashback to a solo liquid light show, some religious experience or another. 

Things get interesting, however, when Danzi layers and stacks other genre signifiers on top of the psychedelia, like the blurry Hall & Oates synth of "Whatever You Need," over a glammy backbeat that might conjure images of Tom Cruise in Risky Business running the streets with Julian Casablancas only to have the moving sidewalks drop out of your visions with the electric harpsichord of "Lullaby Lazy" and you're suddenly running through a Strawberry Fields British countryside estate, silhouetted by the setting sun, as you sit down to smoke hookah with the Caterpillar and Kevin Ayers. 

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