Entering into David Shane Smith’s world is a weird and fascinating experience, filled with a dreamy synth-pop (an overuse term in his case, but I'd say the dream often turns close to nightmarish) multi-layeredwith scratching and vibrating noises, melancholic keys, drum-machine-generated beats, and his vocals going to an almost church-choir-like falsetto to amid-chanting-mid-lamenting rap.
Standing alone in front of his synth and a few knob-turningboxes, he was performing at the Satellite on Sunday night, slowly opening a hypnotic and listener-challenging loopy soundscape, rarely stopping between his songs. His experimental sound is quite difficult to describe, as it was full and thick, complex and demanding, intense and evocative, eerie and strange, but especially really unlike anything I had ever heard.
Smith was going from ethereal synth-pop confections like ‘Shampoo’ or ‘Beach’, to word-crowded tracks delivered on a semi-rap tone, tocyclic noises-and-beats-parasitized anxious numbers like ‘Manmade’, digging a deep groove in weirdness. Strings or backup vocals could be heard behind his echoing and angelic vocals on some of his tracks, which often seemed to mix the ancient and the modern with a rare grace.
With this electronic equipment, I was somewhat expecting a more industrial sound, but it was astonishingly organic behind all this experimental background, and moving, with some of the songs dying like the super computer HAL in 2001 Space Odyssey. And one of the most touching songs may have been ‘Shampoo’, for which he has recently released a video, an aerial tune with a haunting melody announcing the passionate-desperate line ‘my drugs come back to me’, and whose ending would you want to wish Jon Brion was collaborating with Kanye West – oh wait, this has already happened.
Seriously, I haven’t found a lot about Dave Smith Shane’s bio, I just know he is now living in Los Angeles and he signs his Twitter account with ‘melodramatic pretentious singer-songwriter’; you should check his avant-garde pop or whatever you want to call it, here: http://davidshanesmith.bandcamp.com
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