Connan Mockasin - Forever Dolphin Love
Ladies and gentlemen, I extend to you a slightly haphazard review of my album of the year, thus far.
There have been some sterling releases ushered into public conscious during 2011; Julianna Barwick’s The Magic Place, Josh T Pearson’s Last of the Country Gentlemen and Plays High Gospel by the mighty Efrim Mehnuk spring to mind. Yet, what all of these albums have in common is, in some way, they all tread paths sullied by the steps of past endeavour. Forever Dolphin Love, on the other hand, floats nonchalantly above various influences; such as Syd Barrett, The Chills and Black Moth Super Rainbow, plucking tiny fragments from its travels and clumsily meshing them into something entirely new.
Mockasin, a native of New Zealand and former frontman of, well, Connan & the Mockasins, has with this debut solo release created what is, at the most basic level, a pop album. However, what he does with the inherently formulaic structure is twist and squeeze it into a gnarled, battered mass. Suddenly guitar hooks that should be immediate, melodies that should flow linear and tunings crisp in their arrangement become warped and bent. They meander off route, falling through cracks and plummeting down into a psychedelic rabbit hole.
Mockasin seemingly revels in putting one over on the listener. Just when you think you’ve sussed it all out, he wipes the smugness out of your chops, veering off wildly into a new sphere of swirling, hypnotic pop pastiche. The guy simply doesn’t allow for respite as he careers from mood to mood, tone to tone. Yet, and here’s where Mockasin ensures this album enters the higher echelons of quality, it all melts into one beguilingly serene whole, a kaleidoscopic cloud, due in no small part to the sophistication in the album’s arrangement.
Forever Dolphin Love is an album bursting with woozy hooks and slurring melodies, primed for snaring the attention of would-be advocates. In that sense, it is a good pop album. It is the unorthodox furnishings that truly stir the senses however, with a lo-fi production aesthetic that suggests there is room for progression should ol’ Connan wish to explore it. On this evidence though, I wouldn’t begrudge him keeping things exactly as they are.