Richard Swift
Dressed Up for the Letdown
(Secretly Canadian)
Swift is one more great artist from the last truly original scene: new weird America. The music is unabashedly minstrel-show, but is also very spacey and psychedelic at times. Swift has a way of mixing early McCartney solo work with the melancholy beauty of Elvis Costello’s Imperial Bedroom crossed with Arthur-era Kinks. Songs such as “Kisses for the Misses” and “Songs of National Freedom” are a late-’60s Anglophile’s dream. They could sound like any band ripping off latter-day Beatles, but Swift’s voice and arrangements and songwriting are astonishing. DUFTL is a lo-fi pop masterpiece.
Trevor MacLaren