William Doyle, formerly the man behind East India Youth, is back with a new record, the remarkably named Great Spans of Muddy Time. It's a hugely ambitious record from the off, one that stretches its wings and attempts to take to the air from its opening seconds. Whether it truly manages and maintains flight will probably depend on the eyes and ears of the beholder and listener and where you stand on this kind of artistic musical endeavour.
Me, I'm personally rather prone to this sort of thing. Doyle's record reminds me of some of the first great pioneers of this kind of vaulted purpose, David Sylvian, Kate Bush, Mark Hollis and Paul Buchanan. Artists who weren't content to be contained by perceived perceptions of what the pop form should limit itself to. I didn't always appreciate their records fully at the time, but over the years have come to realise that eccentric and specifically obsessive vision is one of the most immensely valuable aspects of the musical world. To put it in its plainest terms, the expression of the truly individual.
Doyle certainly has a vision and it's fascinating to watch him straining muscle and sinew to realise it on Great Spans of Muddy Time. This is one of the most interesting albums I've heard so far this year. As I've said, I feel it's essentially rooted in the ambience of the Eighties and though he doesn't remind me particularly of any of the great musicians I mentioned above, he does seem to share some of their essential DNA.
The album has a definite pop quality. It has melodies and commercial potential but it's consistently unwilling to compromise its ideals in just the same way as Sylvian, Bush, Hollis and Buchanan were and you can almost see the record executives scratching their chins at board meetings, attempting to puzzle out exactly how they were going to extract a hit single out of an album so essentially dreamlike.
I started the last particular musical weekend on Friday morning by plumping for the obvious, trying to enjoy the new Lana Del Ray record, the most imediately high profile release of that day, with little success. It seemed strangely inert, joyless and lifeless, stuck in its particular rut. I've since expanded my horizons and found three other new albums, much more to my liking. Three records of totally different musical stripe by Middle Kids, Wurld Series and now this one, William Doyle's.
Doyle's record is by far the best of the three, and one of the most compelling records I've heard thus far this year. It's an album that really takes you somewhere if you're willing to go with it. Exploratory, strange yet filled with inspiration, wonder and the spirit of enquiry. It's surely significant that Doyle abandoned the East India Youth moniker, one with which he'd already made some commercial and critical inroads and went back to his own name in an attempt perhaps to truly inhabit his own skin.
This I'd say is him learning to do so. Great Spans of Muddy Time is an extraordinary record. Not for everyone by any means but for anyone who really hopes for journeys when they sit down and listen to a new record. To go somewhere they've never been before. Great Spans does exactly that. Doyle may well have painted his masterpiece.
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