Boasting bodacious ’burns, a snocky jazz beard, a hammer-combed hair-stack, and decked out all in black (’cept the white tie, natch), Melvern Taylor’s cover photos conjure up Al Franken screen-testing for a role as a two-bit bagman in an early Scorsese flick. Start the disc, though, and such thoughts fade immediately as Taylor unleashes a nonstop tour-de-force of intelligent, unpredictable pop.
Raised in Andover and schooled (some at UMass, but mostly in the pubs) in Lowell, Massachusetts, Taylor wears his slightly-blackened heart proudly on his sleeve. On the heels of his luminous 1999 debut, Handsome Bastard, Taylor has upped the ante on a candid, fresh approach to pop music true to both sheer tunefulness and rock ’n’ roll spirit, while generally bypassing the slavish, by-the-numbers tributes of post-Fabs power-poppers.
A dedicated pop formalist with the wounded sentimentality of an Elvis Costello, Melvern flexes his supple, world-class tenor (think of Squeeze’s Glen Tilbrook souped up with a killer falsetto) and tasty wiseguy observations over surprising, alternately lush/minimalist arrangements.
Taylor supplies basic guitars and myriad keyboard textures, while his Fabulous Mel-tones lay on enviable backing vocals and inventive dynamic strokes (generally acoustic) with assorted stringed instruments, percussion and hand-claps. The tender 3 a.m. weeper “Blue Evening Dress”, for example, is punctuated variously by “impressions” of Hawaiian-style steel (on slide guitar) and a balalaika (on mandolin), plus a full-throated, heartbreaking roller-skate-rink organ. Clucking banjos and wheezing squeezeboxes slip in and out.
These are great songs, lovingly played and sung. At least three or four songs here will knock you out, and probably not the same ones for everybody. Melvern Taylor is locked in, and his otherworldly pump is most certainly primed.
