Clue To Kalo - One Way, It's Every Way

  by Chris Jones

published: 19 / 10 / 2005

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Review

It took a fair bit of time and a bit of circumstance before this album clicked with me. My expectations were quite high as 2003's 'Come Here When You Sleepwalk' made my Top 10 album list that year and has continued to get regular play time on the stereo. For a follow up to '...Sleepwalk', I was wishing for some more vocals and maybe a bit more of a pop feel. Ironically, my initial reaction to 'One Way, It's Every Way' was "Where did the electronics and subtle vocals go ?" The difference between the two albums isn't quite night and day, but had I just heard one of the songs from 'One Way...' and not been told it was Clue to Kalo I highly doubt I would have guessed that it was. While my expectations were surely partly to blame, the musical direction that Mark Mitchell has taken is definitely different from the one he had been on. A few weeks went by with me wondering if I hated this album or just the fact that it wasn't what I had expected. And then it happened. I was driving a rental car from JFK airport, past Manhattan, and up towards lovely Fishkill, New York. I popped Sufjan Stevens' album 'Illinois' into the CD player. I marvelled at how his songs are capable of being sparse, delicate, rich, loud, simple, and complex all within 4 minutes or so. It's pop and so much more without feeling contrived, forced, or kitschy. The CD ended and for whatever reason I decided to pop in 'One Way, It's Every Way' next. Ah-ha! Suddenly this album made so much more sense to me. A song like 'Your Palsy to Protect', which has the electronic aspects I really liked about the first album but also prominent vocals and loads of pop elements that had initially thrown me off, sounded damn near perfect now! Sparse, delicate, rich, loud, simple, and complex all within 4 minutes or so. Yes, I see. A bit of a West Coast/60's pop feel, some electropop elements, a Ray Manzarek-esque organ tone, piano, horns, skittering drums, slide guitar, acoustic guitar, and who knows what else all merging together, dropping out and gliding off in a new direction again. It's definitely not '...Sleepwalk - Part 2' and thanks to Sufjan Stevens I realized that that's not a bad thing. Not a bad thing at all.

Track Listing:-

1 The Younger the Old
2 Seconds When It's Minutes
3 Come to Mean a Natural Law
4 The Just Is Enough
5 As Tommy Fixes Fights
6 Ignore the Forest Floor
7 The Tense Changes
8 Your Palsy to Protect You
9 Nine Thousand Nautical Miles
10 The Older the Young

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