Even though it covered heavy personal subjects, such as his mother's dementia and the death of his father, the record offered an antidote to the-then receding winter months. It's laid-back warmth - augmented by Bernard Butler's guitar and even on one song, a guest appearance by David Gilmour and his trippy pedal steel - became my go-to listen for the subsequent months. Pure sunshine in a CD, or whatever format it came on.
24 months on, Watt has, to a certain extent, repeated the experience with Fever Dream. And that, believe me, is a very good thing indeed. From start to finish, musically at least, another revitalising, Vitamin D-infused first blast of sun on the face after months of cold, wet, grey misery. Long may Watt, his writing and recording schedule, and his record company, keep these albums appearing in April.
Now, in positioning Fever Dream in this manner, don't think that it's all about, you know, just vibe. This certainly isn't one of those Buddha Bar compilations piped through the lobby of a hip boutique hotel. It is, though, as with its predecessor - and, actually, all the best material Watt and wife Tracey Thorn produced in Everything But The Girl - a highly accessible, automatically familiar, and totally agreeable collection of wonderfully dreamy songs, albeit with an edge. "We kept Hendra’s sonic template of open-tuned folk-jazz and distorted string-bent rock, and went for a new grainy intensity," Watt himself explains on his website. "We just did most of it live. Small room, small band. A harder edge. Instruments spilling into each other."
With Hendra separated from its predecessor North Marine Drive by almost 31 years (in mitigation he had been busy in the interim with EBTG and, like Thorn, becoming a very distinguished author) it, he says, opened up his creativity. Fever Dream is the result of that fertility: "I was simply deeply inspired by the Hendra experience, the reception, the months of touring, the rediscovery of my voice," Watt says. "I felt compelled to write more. They came in a burst at the beginning of last year. I feel I have somehow tapped into a nucleus of myself again lately. It feels urgent. From the source."
That source is, clearly, an urge to examine relationships, those to cherish, those to question and those to forget, encased in varying pitch of jazz and folk influences and even a West Coast, Laurel Canyon timbre. As Watt says, there are obvious tonal similarities to the previous album, with Butler once more deftly applying grungy, Neil Young-like guitar flourishes.
The mood is set by the woozily luscious opener Gradually and its line "Something about your love just got to me gradually/Like an autumn fire/A growing intensity" which comes pretty close for an intimate declaration to John Martyn's seminal "You curl around me like a fern in the spring". The next two songs, the title track and Between Two Fires (not to be confused with Zach Galifianakis and Between Two Ferns, hem hem...) clip along at a sprightly pace, the former comparable with the gentle pop of, say, Christopher Cross (not to be dismissed as merely AOR, either), with the latter musing on how "Sometimes love can last a lifetime/Other times it tires/I can not blame you now it's gone/We were caught between two fires", Butler's guitar squawking in the background to add a sense of unsettlement to the track. Both could enrich the soundtrack to driving a convertible up to Big Sur. But there is a ponderous undercurrent from which a darker hue emerges, calling into question the integrity of relationships and, perhaps, simply asking, in the words of this very blog, "Where are we now?".
This is not, however, a break-up record, or the precursor to one. The examination of relationships is observational and questioning, rather than cathartic or confessional, but it's to Watt's strength that he can lay such examinational lyrics over relatively simple, relaxing arrangements, themselves the result of uncomplicated interplay between Watt, Butler, bassist Rex Horan (to be heard on Laura Marling's work) and prolific session drummer Martin Ditcham, whose working relationship with Watt goes back to EBTG. Ditcham, in particular, provides the sort of cold, faded rhythms he contributed to Talk Talk's The Colour Of Spring - on Winter's Eve, mallets beat out a muted pattern on tom toms, but not to express a sad, year's end reflection, rather one of uplifting positivity at odds with the music behind it.
Mentioning John Martyn earlier (those who know me well will attest that I'll mention him at any opportunity...), part of my supreme enjoyment of this album stems from tracks like Faces Of My Friends, a combination of grace and danger and on which Watt could so easily be supplanted by the big man's whisky-soured drawl. On that front, it's worth noting how good Watt's vocals are on this album. He has never been blessed with a traditional lead singer's depth and spectrum - and that did show on Hendra. Maybe with confidence drawn from the previous album, throughout Fever Dream Watt conveys more heft, complimenting the music rather than trying to fit into it, blending into the bluesier aspects of Butler's guitar work as well.
That said, on the closing track, New Year Of Grace, he brings in Bostonian vocalist Marissa Nadler to add a vocal layer to a beautiful, sparse song that Watt's natural range might not have otherwise carried so well alone. Again, another example of tone and lyric providing reversible contrast, on this occasion the barely-there instrumentation delicately mixed into the background of a wistful lyric that cleverly and subtly acknowledges enduring love. And in being so unspectacular, it actually provides a spectacular ending to the album.
It's hard not to compare Fever Dream to its predecessor, if only because Watt invites such comparison. There is, though a clear progress between them, though. Whereas Hendra seemed to be an exploration of styles, its follow-up brims with even greater conviction, purpose and direction. It is the album that I can assure you, you'll want to be playing all summer long.
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