Few things make me happier than witnessing artistic visions whose eccentricity is the unselfconscious byproduct of a highly individual vision. When those visions involve Japanese movie monsters, I am drawn to them like Mothra to a flame.
The latest from Fall River’s wild visionary Daniel Ouellette piles on the camp from the instant you catch sight of the cover, a crazyquilt collage of Mount Fuji, dogs on a pagoda roof, a giant butterfly and the band (the Shobijin, a reference to the diminutive, fairy-like women who accompany Mothra) reacting to the scene with faux surprise. It’s called The Enchantment (Songs to sing whilst you sharpen your pencil).
Then there’s the actual music. Even if you aren’t a fan of dance music or electronica, Ouellette delivers, from the first instant, a brand of pop that activates seldom-visited corners of the brain. He’s been at it for a good few years, and never wavered from what seems to be his mission: delivering what’s in his head in as pure a fashion as he can. His sound seems directly descended from New Wave, but few artists, apart from peculiar hipsters like the B-52s, offer such easy mixing of humor and coolness in that New Wave package.
Ouellette’s voice is unusual for pop, a meaty baritone that quavers with a nearly loungey inflection. With it he delivers wry lyrics, manifestations of his askew imaginings. In the first words of the album, things get weird: “There is a wolf in California/ Who is going to send me a dollar bill.” In another tune, he offers the kind of unexpected one-two punch that reveals the quirky contours of his vision: “This Ouija board spells your name/ and it does it correctly.”
In some of his efforts, Ouellette’s music has been just a stripped-down accompaniment to his antics. In videos and live performances, he delivers his wild imaginings with straight-faced conviction, sometimes with only one other musician in evidence. On The Enchantment, his second CD with the Shobijin, Ouellette joins forces with a sizeable list of accomplices, and the result is music that goes even farther in bolstering his unique brand of campy electronica. Instead of minimalist beats and washes of keyboard, the album offers gritty electric guitar, backing vocals, and highly processed sounds of all sorts. The effect is something like a combination of the backing track on a Casio keyboard and a DJ-warped version of funked-up acoustic world music (a didgeridoo even rumbles along gamely in the background at one point, and accordion and violin make appearances).
The album does have one moment (one of few I can recall among his many songs) in which the wizard behind the curtain is revealed—in “My Partyboy Got Covered in Lip Gloss (Standing on the Wrong Porch with All of our Shiny Clothes!),” Oullette narrates a story of mistaken identity that, with its joke-like setup and delivery, leaves little doubt that the humor in his songs is entirely intentional, something his efforts usually seem to leave in question.
It’s great to hear Ouellette with yet more tools at his disposal. On The Enchantment, he paints with an even larger palette, and the results are deeply engaging and deeply weird, like a roller coaster ride through Liza Minnelli’s walk-in closet and a monster-movie set.
