Album: Mocky - Music Will Explain (Choir Music Vol. 1)

Dominic “Mocky” Salole has had a long career in which the tension between authenticity and pastiche has been a constant. Toronto-born, of English and Yemeni heritage, he came of musical age in the Bohemian hotbed of 1990s Berlin with a close-knit bunch of other Canadian ex-pats, including Peaches, Chilly Gonzales and Feist.

In the early days, this mini-scene was about a delirious collision of huge musical ambition and the urge to goof off at every turn. Puppet shows, silly rap personae, punk provocation and cabaret razzle-dazzle meshed with musical virtuosity, electronic experimentation, with the truly great and the bafflingly silly rarely far apart. Now based in LA, Mocky has taken this chaos and focused it over the years.

Where his compadre Gonzales, who continued to let archness and tomfoolery reign as his profile and musical virtuosity rose and rose, Mocky has progressively leant into sincerity. This has involved a sloughing off of rap and electronic influences and pursuit of “the essence of humanity in an increasingly digital and artificial world” by obsessively recreating the composition, arrangement and recording techniques of the past, particularly the late 1960s and early 1970s.

So here, complete with harps, glockenspiels, French horns and his friends forming the unschooled titular choir, he dives deep into post-Pet Sounds Beach Boys, The Free Association, Rotary Connection, Os Mutantes, Gris-Gris era Dr John and all that kind of stuff beloved of groovy folks the world over. And he does it exquisitely… but maybe just a little bit too much so. The problem is: while this is a gorgeous listen, doubly so in the sunshine, it all too often feels so beholden to the source material that Mocky’s painted himself out of the picture.

Similarly retro acts like, say, Jimi Tenor’s Afrobeat grooves or the spiritual jazz celebration of Jimetta Rose’s Voices of Creation community choir project manage to be instantly recognisable as themselves, whereas this just sounds like its influences. It comes into focus on the title track, where he’s front and centre, singing about how these gorgeous arrangements impact on him. Suddenly it’s more than the sum of its parts, and it’s super distinctive. So a lovely listen, but also a frustrating glimpse of a more personal record trying to be heard over the perfectly crafted references.

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