Stacy Lloyd Brown
Automatic
(Musical Chair Music/Youth Club)
This is how a lot of great artists sound when making their start: by turns bizarre and untidy, earnest and direct, down home and downtown and somehow seamless in sewing it all up into a single sound. Think of Beck on K Records (One Foot in the Grave), Vic Chesnutt, Gord Gano (of Violent Femmes) or Chad VanGaalen.
On this full-length, Automatic, bringing together a couple different EPs, Stacy Lloyd Brown has an imagination for the strange collage of scenes and feelings produced by the world. He comes across more clearly than Beck because he’ll simply query what it means to be, and how one lives a good and right life. Lloyd Brown’s voice, which sounds so much like Gano’s at times, makes listening a joy.
There are some great story songs, too---little short stories, such as “The Ballad of Orely Burwash and Salisbury Jenkins”---that conjure Chesnutt’s storytelling style. Other standout tracks include “Bloody Pockets,” “Living Room,” “Strawback” and “War on Fat.”
Stacy Lloyd Brown came east from Alberta to find a place in the Halifax music community, alongside pals such as Fall Horsie, Ghost Bees and Museum Pieces---all part of the broader Youth Club Records populace. Musical Chair Music is an offshoot of Youth Club.
---Sean Flinn
