Rob Zombie might seem like an odd place to start, but I have always held him up as an example.
See, when he left White Zombie to go solo, there didn’t seem much point, essentially because all his stuff – and I’m a fan – sounded the same anyway.
That’s not the case here. Of course, you can tell it’s Mark Chadwick. That voice is too distinctive for anything else. But this is not The Levellers.
The title track makes that clear immediately. “Ouse Dragon” is eerie, cinematic and totally unsettling. There is a plot unfolding – “got into the dark car that drove off” – but nothing is neatly explained. It is a sensational opening.
“Chrysanthemums & Diadems” begins acoustically, but it is quite unlike anything you’ve ever heard. A phone rings somewhere within its strange soundscape and, so convincing is it, I genuinely checked that it wasn’t mine. It is a small detail that captures how immersive the record becomes.
There is something deeply unsettling about the ambient noise running through “Dance Of The Crows”. Even when the chorus arrives, there is nothing uplifting. Instead, the tension remains, the music hovering somewhere between folk song, film score and nightmare.
“Leap” is perhaps the most conventional piece here, built around a simple plea and a gentler melody. Yet even that cannot remove the shadow hanging over the album. There is always a sense that something dreadful has happened, or is about to.
“Bearing Witness” is a real folky one, bound by its community and the stories that communities carry. It feels rooted in its surroundings, but this is folk music concerned less with celebration than with memories and secrets that refuse to disappear.
“Paxos Room” returns to the more experimental approach. Sounds drift in and out, voices seem to exist at the edge of perception and the album finishes without offering anything as comforting as resolution.
Ouse Dragon is a compelling, dark and dense record that probably hasn’t revealed itself to you fully yet. That is precisely what solo material should do: allow an artist to explore somewhere their band cannot take them.
Chadwick remains unmistakable throughout, but Ouse Dragon emphatically isn’t The Levellers. Perfect solo material, frankly.
Rating: 8.5/10
