Seventies coke-fueled electro pop? A healthy dose of P-Funk style bass whallops and groove? Larry Graham on the floor with Queen and the Raspberries? Toss it in. Hit blend. I've often referred to the "musical blender" when attempting to disentangle genres and sounds from artists who seem hell bent on creating a storm of their influences. You can toss pretty much anything into the proverbial musica
l appliance; sometimes the results are little more than pulp, and other times they're messy beyond all reason. Sometimes what gets ground up and churned out is just as good, and perhaps even better, than what went in. The 2015 rerelease of the album PEAR, courtesy of Burger records, is the latter variety. The blades are kept sharp for a recipe that borders on o
There are also elements of R&B leanings, synth-fed glam, psychedelic squabbles, and sounds that seem like the ghost of Freddie Mercury is twisting its way through the madness. If all of this sounds like some overtly schizophrenic, deranged-pop clusterfunk, then you're right on the money. But that's what makes PEAR so damn good. So what kind of bull-goose loony, basement-dwelling mad-scientist, you might ask, is responsible for such a beautiful mess? The many frenetic voices and seemingly endless layers coalesce inside the brain of Danny James. He's the mastermind behind the album, along with his band Etc. But he's also far from an isolated neurotic. James stakes his visions on the harmony and feedback of the artists he both respects and works with.
'I think you need to be able to bounce ideas off a network of cats,' James tells BTR.
'Even some very talented people who seem like they are in isolation are actually surrounded by a bunch of luminaries. I look for those people; that's how the band is now. It's people that are better than me.'
His penchant for excellence is a byproduct of a family where cultivating unreachable musical boundaries has always been the norm. The experience was growing up with a 'gang of weirdos,' as James puts it, where he quickly understood everyone was better than him. They were hyper ambitious, but not in a financial sense. More so, the sentiment of competitive creation was always at stake.
'I can draw better than you!'
'I can sing better than you!'
'You suck!'
'Get the hell out of here!'
Words like these spoken by a loved one might deliver the lasting haunt of trauma for some, but for James this kind of artistic comeuppance was exactly what the songwriter needed to excel. Sure, such put-downs probably aren't the best route of encouragement to employ on a societal level, but they can be a good catalyst for creativity in certain personal spheres. While citing his development as a musician, James tips the hat nearly clean off his head for his brother Michael Louis.
'He's a virtuoso by any stretch of the imagination,' James says.
'It sounds funny, but he can do things that he doesn't do. We have a lot of other musicians on the record, but they're through the filter of his arrangements. I did four of the tracks by myself, but only because he was too busy playing with Stevie Wonder, Lalah Hathaway, and playing hip-hop cruises around the world.'
No joke. In the liner notes for PEAR, Louis is credited with guitar, bass, keys, backing vocals, percussion, and drums. He also arranged and produced eight of the 11 songs on the album. The concept and writing, however, are all James. Following the disbandment of his garage-rock group The Cuts, James and songwriting partner/rhythm guitar player Mike "General Luau" decided to embark on a project decidedly less restrictive. Like a computer or artificial intelligence, James explains, when a band becomes too self-aware it's time to call it quits. The new idea started off as a play on words, a pair because there were only two of them. However the duo soon realized that the songs were becoming too ambitious for two people, so they needed another double entendre. Before they knew it, the ensemble had expanded to include six, and sometimes seven, members.
'It started off with us saying, 'let's be a band with two cats who carry newspapers under their arms and pork pie hats,' laughs James. 'But it couldn't work. We didn't want it to be some yacht rock, depression-era, KISS thing.'
Truth be told, a lot of what got tossed into the blender that cranked out PEAR was music the duo loved that most people thought to be square before the revival of record collecting. James cites The Beach Boys as a prime example. People didn't think they were hip in the late '90s; if The Beach Boys were your favorite band you were still an outsider. So how can anything not be hip now?
'If you're not thinking for yourself and you're a schmuck, you're probably not hip,' reasons James. 'But that's the way it's always been.'
James and Etc. are gearing up to hit the studio sometime later this year, with another release on the way." - Breakthru Radio NYC, Zach Schepis
"Last year's Pear, the latest from soul/garage/pop genius Danny James, is an prime example how just how fruitful genre schizophrenia can be. Lying somewhere between Joe Jackson, The Brothers Johnson and The Move- James surprises the listener at every turn with his versatility/pop sensibility. Its also a great example of just how on-fire Burger Records has been over the past few years. I mean, where do they find all of these pop savants? My guess is some sort of satanic blood pact. Its astonishing just how many 'true originals' the label has uncovered for the benefit of us all. While the cassette is no longer in stock, you can still pick up a digital copy off of his bandcamp page. And hey, maybe if we're lucky Burger will run off a few more." - Why Pick On Me
"Perhaps unexpected from a contemporary underground rock act come tones and grooves that could just as easily fit in with '70s funk and soul. Singer/bassist Danny James has an ethereal voice that rises above the mellow cotton candy clouds of sound and continues on into space. Add to that harmonies and guitar work with an affinity for glam rock, and you have something that redefines the concept of retro. "
- San Francisco Chronicle
"Danny James was doing the garage rock thing nearly a decade ago, making Arthur Lee-inspired psychedelic pop with his band the Cuts on the stellar LP 2 Over Ten in 2003. From the sounds of his debut solo album Pear, it seems like James has spent the interim period holed up in a home studio tripping balls and existing solely on a diet of ELO, Queen, and Todd Rundgren records pulled from the dollar bin. This is fussy, well-produced rock music, with each track having so many parts and ideas stuffed in that it can’t help but be overwhelming. Pear is an album that straddles the line between the smooth MOR pop you hear in the doctor’s waiting room and the bats**t-crazy drama of “Bohemian Rhapsody”, and it’s a shock to the senses to hear music with this kind of sonic detail when so much new stuff is minimal, loud, and blurry. A ballad like “Without Reluctance” lopes along with little wah-wah funk guitar chops before busting into a furious analog keyboard solo, and the whole thing is drenched in massively overdubbed harmonies. Things open up with more traditional guitar pop near the end, but even a rocker like “(That’s Not) The Plan” is impressively weird. Pear is out on cassette now from Burger Records. There are plans for a vinyl reissue later in the year." - Zach Braun, Get Bent
"PEAR is the quantum entangling of atomized mental ephemera,
Dancing about an ecosystem of plastic plantations....
Danny James' music occupies city hall, loitering in teapot shanties with time released vi**ra femme boost steroids like a Mr. Tea drag queen. "
- Ariel Pink
