Shady Planet – Jason Warburg

So.  About Peter Dixon’s Shady Planet.

You could say this: “…sounds like the dream sequence soundtrack of a child who has just been read Edgar Allen Poe bedtime stories… a seductive work of quarreling melodic and dissonant interplay that is mysterious and intriguing.”*

Or you could just say “whoooooa” and move on, quickly, because this music is so genuinely eerie in its evocation of a sort of lounge-jazz netherworld that you’ll be jumping at shadows inside of five minutes under its intoxicating spell.

*(I realize that was cheating a bit, but the one-sheet Powderfinger Promotions sent in with this disc was one of the best-written I’ve ever received, so much so that it seems a waste to keep it to myself.)

Before going solo, Dixon was the keyboard player and frequent composer for Combustible Edison, the band credited with coining the term “cocktail nation" and a mainstay of the '90s lounge music scene.  The only lounge this music would be suited for, though, would be very red, and very hot.

The title track opens things up in a shambolic limbo of off-kilter string-plucking (ukelele?) over haunted-house synth tones and thump-in-the-night percussion effects.  The mid-song breakdown to whistly synth effects and spooky electronic blips only reinforces the macabre atmospherics — and yet, there is a definite melodic thread weaving through the entire tune.

“Moss Points” is a more typical number — if such a thing exists on an album like this — a two-and-a-half minute vignette that veers from Phantom-ish opera organ to psychedelic lounge jazz, all the while bathing what feels suspiciously like a polka rhythm in melodic strangeness.

When the random-mystery-lady-speaking-French-or-something-like-it makes a cameo appearance halfway through “Sundra Strait” — just before the honking bass clarinet solo that sounds vaguely like the player is being attacked by wasps — you can be quite sure you’re not in Kansas any more.  The fact that next cut “Mastic Shirley” starts off with a jaunty little horn melody over funeral-parlor organ pretty much completes to process of complete musical disorientation.

Shady Planet is not date music, or barbecue in the backyard music, or driving music, or anything but fascinatingly different and unique music.  That said, if Tim Burton hasn’t heard this stuff yet, he needs to. 

Happy Halloween…!

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