Some records ask to be liked. ‘Chalet Café’ would rather be argued with. JIM, the alias of Crazy P’s James Baron, has handed the microphone to Jason Williamson of Sleaford Mods, a voice like a match struck on brick. On paper it shouldn’t work. Over those piano chords, it does.
The music sat unfinished for a while, a lovely thing without a voice to complete it, until a conventional vocal refused to land and JIM went looking for what he calls ‘radical alternatives’. Both men live in Nottingham, and it shows. This doesn’t feel like a marriage arranged by A&R. It feels like two neighbours leaning over a fence and discovering a common language.
The piano carries the harmony, in warm, haunting chords that hold a little sadness without wallowing in it. At an unhurried 100 bpm there’s room for every phrase to settle. Over that, Williamson brings what most records at this tempo spend their budgets avoiding: discomfort. He draws on his own poetry and drags up memories that neither flatter nor resolve, in that clipped, spitting cadence. Against the softness of the chords it’s a splinter in a velvet glove. With a pace this relaxed there’s nowhere to hide and no rush to soften the blow. JIM admits it won’t be for everybody. That is usually a good sign.
The instrumental version deserves its own mention. Strip the vocal away and the piano and chords stand perfectly well alone, which is the best evidence that this began life as a fine piece of music looking for the right voice. Selectors get two distinct records for the price of one: the confrontation and the consolation.
Vicious Charm is the right home for it. Damian Harris talks of bursting the ‘cosy Balearic bubble’, and the genre can be a sun-dappled place that occasionally mistakes comfort for substance. This is the open window in the stuffy room. Early support from Gilles Peterson and Colleen ‘Cosmo’ Murphy, two of the scene’s most trusted ears, suggests the bubble is more elastic than feared.
Verdict: Awkward, tender, abrasive and oddly moving, the sound of two Nottingham voices refusing to meet in the middle and finding something better at the edges. Play the vocal when the evening needs a jolt, the instrumental when it needs a hush, and enjoy the raised eyebrows either way.
Best for: Left-field selectors, Balearic heretics, and anyone who suspects the best collaborations sound slightly like an argument.
Martin Madigan 5
