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Since even your grandparents probably have an acquaintance with the bones of the Shack story by now, we won’t bore you with yet another account of studio fires, lost master tapes, drug addiction and patronage from generous believers. A far more relevant story right now is how they have come full circle in their pursuit of that elusive, revelatory moment that gave birth to the chiming beauty of their masterpiece, ‘Waterpistol’, and have damn near recaptured that magic in the process.
If 2003’s ‘Here’s Tom With The Weather’ captured a band a little too at ease with their art, ‘The Corner of Miles and Gil’ captures Mick Head, his brother John, the bedraggled Ian Templeton and scouse rock über-bassist Pete Wilkinson (reunited with the Head brothers for the first time since ‘Waterpistol’, and not without significance) rediscovering the music that brought them together in the first place and seeing into what wondrous shapes they can twist it. Shack have always been a band to wear their record collections on their sleeve, but this has to be their most adventurous tribute to date. Quite aside from the album title (a reference to the Heads’ heroes Miles Davis and his arranger Gil Evans), centre piece ‘Miles Away’ (yes, we get it) lifts directly from the jazz legend’s ‘All Blues’ (from the seminal ‘Kind of Blue’), whilst still keeping the raw acoustic soul of their band at the core. It’s big, brave and gloriously out of sync with everything else that is being put out in 2006.
The same blue-note spirit weaves its way through all corners of this album, from John’s swinging solo chanson ‘New Day’ to the mesmeric ‘Black and White’, where the psychedelic jazz-folk of The Byrds is set alight by John’s most incendiary guitar work since ‘HMS Fable’’s ‘Streets Of Kenny’. Even the curious ‘Funny Things’ invites Coltrane-esque sax lines into the mix, resulting in a dizzying blend of Gershwin and Zappa.
Of course, the genius of Mick Head is found in his simple, almost childlike, yet always mischievious approach to songwriting that makes his ongoing commercial failure so unfathomable. It’s in the way he can sing about your lover wanting you to tie her up ('Dad’s in the Navy/So use a granny knot’, she says, ever so matter-of-factly) over the mariachi horns and gentle summer lilt of ‘Tie Me Down’. It’s in the way he can moan about having his cuppa spiked whilst bashing out jangling pop (‘Cup Of Tea’) and namecheck characters from Aussie daytime soap ‘Home and Away’ in a ghostly ballad (‘Finn, Sophie, Bobby and Lance’). But ‘…The Corner of Miles and Gil’ pushes the envelope yet further, hiding less behind masses of strings (a charge that could be brought against their last two long players) and instead allowing the melodies their own space.
Continuing on from a theme developed on the stronger tracks from ‘Here’s Tom… ’, Mick’s ‘Closer’ and the afore-mentioned ‘Miles Away’ amount more to movements than songs, building to choruses before darting hare-like into musical burrows and tunnels only to resurface in places sometimes familiar yet often quite strange. And that’s not even the whole story – an interesting footnote is the ever-increasing contribution of John to the Shack oeuvre; here adding a dark and otherworldly set of songs that range from the rather shapeless (‘Moonshine’) to the understatedly epic (‘Find A Place’). Waterpistol’, this album could never match, but it’s certainly an album to rank alongside it.
