Adrien Munden – The Truth is Weaponised
Dripping with melancholy, this is an astonishingly assured and mature work. In an age when we select rather than browse and skim rather than immerse, it’s such a pleasure to fall across an album of such substance.
A couple of weeks ago I suggested that The Great Divide by AP3 was my single of the year. I did so because it’s an infectiously brilliant tune, but also because I was astonished at its existence. After ten years in hibernation, Audioporn (now trading under the name AP3) appear to have re-emerged like Lazarus with an altogether leaner, funkier sound that is dangerously close to danceable. Encouraged to dig deeper, I was sorry to find nothing else by the band, but I did fall across an album of songs that has just been released by Adrien Munden, their lead singer. Following the band’s first new song in ten years with a solo album doesn’t look much like joined up commercial thinking to me, but it’s an astonishingly assured and mature work.
There’s a tacit nod to that past in the opening track, where Munden declaims frankly and intimately to the several listeners who might recall the band’s earlier incarnation. When he asks “Do you remember me?” it feels like it is you he is addressing. This is a record that is all about time – times past, time lost, time spent and time wasted. When Munden speaks of ten years becoming fifteen in Stay True Immersion, I am reminded of Roger Waters’s warning that one day you find ten years have got behind you. But Waters was barely thirty at the time, while Munden is looking down the other end of the telescope, uncomfortably aware that those years have gone. It’s the first of many songs dripping with melancholy, and while I suppose he could be making all this up, when he says that In Pursuit of HappinessI may have done some wrong, it feels painfully raw. The song has a superb heartbeat of a dub bass line and an infectious melody – using a cimbalom, perhaps – that John Barry would be proud of. Its repeated mantra will have the unwary suffering from earworm after one listening.
Thankfully, after all that confessional angst, when we arrive at Summer Diving there is a little ray of sunshine peeking through, and it’s surely no coincidence that it comes with his daughter Lulu, guesting on vocals. If you can recall when Kate Bush crept onto Peter Gabriel’s So, you will have some idea of the effect of her elfin voice on what is already an achingly beautiful love song. If that sounds like one too many twentieth century reference, then add to that snatches I heard of Shriekback, Chk Chk Chk , Ennio Morricone,Hawkwind, Paco de Lucia, King Crimson and Stackridge. I’m not saying that Munden imitates them or is influenced by them. He may not have consciously heard of them. What is clear, however, is how heavily imbued his music is with the kind of sounds we stupidly took for granted last century - dense, complex compositions that take time and effort to fully grasp - music that cross-pollenated in exciting and unpredictable ways.
It seems obvious to me that Munden grew up in an age when a record offered something new with each listening and where lyrics were feverishly poured over and argued about. In Fizzing Cities, he’s got the hump with Paul Weller for selling shoes, with John Lydon for advertising butter, and Joe Strummer for flogging jeans. This is because they are his heroes, and they have let him down. Almost drowned out by the traffic (is that him busking?) he is left wondering why no one is yearning when he still is. This is earnest stuff, but not an easy message to take.
Thank the Lord, then, for the mordant wit of Arrival No 7, where you risk a slow death in the endless void of the garden centre. I’ve little idea what he’s rattling on about in this one, but that infectious drumbeat and incessant guitar noodling combine to offer up the nearest thing to the cinematic scope of his old band. Coming in at a little over ten minutes it’s a mini opus that remains infuriatingly opaque, but enormous fun. Yet more happy times then lie ahead as Lulu re-joins the party for the closing song, a long and languorous journey that introduces some fine slide guitar playing, while offering the glimmer of hope that, although stagnant murk is all around us, we will swim again When Summer Comes.
It’s a typically ambivalent close to an intensely personal album characterised by regret and doubt, but also tenacity and hope. In an age when we select rather than browse and skim rather than immerse, it’s such a pleasure to fall across an album of such substance. It’s a pleasure to proselytize in support of it. Yet you can’t help wonder how many people will get to hear it, something I suspect Adrien Munden wonders every day. Hopefully, it is of some comfort that those happy few of who did so will be forever enriched by the experience.
