Dan Sperber Photo: supplied
Think On Your Feet, SPERB3R
I first came across Dan Sperber in the late nineties/early noughties in The New Lounghead and The Relaxomatic Project; both essentially instrumental groups who cleverly combined the technique of jazzers with the sensibilities of suburban hipsters. Basically, whatever they were doing, it passed for high-end chill-out music, and very nice it was too. A bit later Sperber made a good album in Berlin with a bunch of fellow-expats under the banner of The Dan Sperber Complex.
But this latest release is a bit different from any of those. For one thing, it’s centred less on Dan’s guitar than on his voice.
It’s a clear, assertive voice, more like a folk singer than a jazzer; not a lot of range but a strong conversational style. And it is a good match for lyrics that are witty, well-observed, and peppered with local landmarks - from Orewa to Britomart. Sperber couldn’t write a dumb-arse country song if he tried; he’s way too clever for that. Which doesn’t mean ‘Dumb Arse Country Song’ isn’t the smart and self-explanatory title for one of these tracks.
He might have Nashville on his mind, but the line-up Sperber has assembled - two guitars, bass and drums - still moves closer to jazz than the kind of group you would find in rock or country. The recording, too, takes a jazz approach, summed up in the album’s title: Think On Your Feet.
Sperber cut it live at Roundhead in Auckland in just a handful of takes, and there’s a looseness, a reliance on reflex rather than arrangement, that you don’t usually find on singer-songwriter albums. That’s a nice idea, but at times it feels as though the songs are less developed than the playing, and in a track like ‘Fake News’ the gaps between lines in the clever lyric are so protracted one almost forgets there’s a song here.
Along with Neil Watson, Sperber is joined for this album by drummer Cameron McCurdy and Olivier Holland, who plays some extraordinarily deft double bass. Beautiful and expansive as the playing is, the songs can seem a little sketchy, and I sometimes wonder whether it would have been better perhaps to have approached these tunes as instrumentals or else worked them a bit more so that lyric and melody could stand on their own two feet. As it is, these often feel like sketches for something Don McGlashan might have taken further.
Think On Your Feet is a beautiful sounding record that puts you in a room with the players, and that’s plenty to recommend it. It’s both a collection of songs and and capturing of real-time performances. Just sometimes, in trying to do two things at once, it runs the risk of leaving both short-changed.
