mon 25/11/2024

CD: Hifi Sean - Ft | reviews, news & interviews

CD: Hifi Sean - Ft.

CD: Hifi Sean - Ft.

Can an underground all star cast make a house album into something more?

Sean DIckson: here's to second, third and more chances

One of the great things about club music is that it deals with ageing in very different ways to rock – and as such can offer fantastic creative rebirths. Witness theartsdesk's recent startling Q&A with Mark Hakwins aka Marquis Hawkes, who'd been around the artistic block and back a good few times before achieving his current success.

Or Sean Dickson – the singer with Scottish indie band The Soup Dragons, who went from Eighties psychedelic janglers to Nineties baggy-clothed ravers, then faded away. Dickson, though, took fully to clubland, is still a jobbing DJ, and has slowly and meticulously put together an album featuring (hence the title) a rollcall of countercultural vocal talent.

There's nothing new here: Dickson's production style is completely of the mid-Nineties. It's essentially straight-down-the-line internationalist house music – some of it lively and glitzy, reminiscent of glitter and club podiums, but a lot of it slower than usual house, paced for poolside drinks or watching the sun rise. But with the vocalists, it becomes a glorious statement of the music's roots in black, gay and/or transgressive culture. So Bootsy Collins delivers a cosmic funk sermon, The B-52s' Fred Schneider camps it up like a good 'un, Yoko Ono offers up a spaced-out love letter to a dying civilisation, and Crystal Waters (of “Gypsy Woman” fame) sings up a storm on the gospel-pop opener “Testify”.

There's even a nod to Dickson's Scots indie roots, with Teenage Fanclub's Norman Blake channeling David Crosby with the gorgeous massed country-folk harmonies of “18th”. And the album is closed off with the heartbreakingly appropriate and benign meditation on mortality “A Kiss Before Dying” – the very final recording made by the 78-year-old Alan Vega before his death. With 13 voices on 13 songs, it inevitably sometimes loses its coherence as an album and maybe with a couple less tracks would have built a stronger identity. But there's so much joy and defiance here, so many killer hooks, and so much expression of dance culture as a place for survivors, that it deserves to be heard very widely indeed. Here's to second, third and more chances.

@joemuggs

It becomes a glorious statement of the music's roots in black, gay and transgressive culture

rating

Editor Rating: 
4
Average: 4 (1 vote)

Share this article

Add comment

The future of Arts Journalism

 

You can stop theartsdesk.com closing!

We urgently need financing to survive. Our fundraising drive has thus far raised £33,000 but we need to reach £100,000 or we will be forced to close. Please contribute here: https://gofund.me/c3f6033d

And if you can forward this information to anyone who might assist, we’d be grateful.

Subscribe to theartsdesk.com

Thank you for continuing to read our work on theartsdesk.com. For unlimited access to every article in its entirety, including our archive of more than 15,000 pieces, we're asking for £5 per month or £40 per year. We feel it's a very good deal, and hope you do too.

To take a subscription now simply click here.

And if you're looking for that extra gift for a friend or family member, why not treat them to a theartsdesk.com gift subscription?

newsletter

Get a weekly digest of our critical highlights in your inbox each Thursday!

Simply enter your email address in the box below

View previous newsletters