Daniel Smith is the patriarch of the Danielson Famile, a longstanding collaborator and pal to Sufjan Stevens, and the former inhabitant of a nine-foot tall, handmade, fruit-bearing tree suit. He's also something of an enigma, aesthetically-speaking, and it's easy to get distracted by Smith's oddball presentation: There are costumes (besides the tree, he's wiggled into a nurse's uniform, heart-shaped blinders, and a sad, Willy Loman-esque Bible salesman suit), Christian ideology, plenty of high, unhinged bleating, and family-band mystique. His work has never been especially easy to categorize ("This man in a tree suit is making high-concept outsider art!" vs. "These are pretty great pop songs written by a dad from New Jersey!"), but genre is an especially fluid thing these days, and on The Best of Gloucester County, his eighth full-length, Smith successfully nods to a variety of influences-- from Daniel Johnston to Genesis-- while still retaining his particular singularity. Call it Daniel-Smith-rock.
2006's Ships, Smith's last release, saw him employing a vast cabal of artists, pals, and players, but the roster for Gloucester County is a lot leaner, and it feels like more of a solo record than nearly anything else Smith has done (Megan, Rachel, and Elin Smith contribute vocals, but otherwise no Famile members are expressly credited). It's not that he doesn't have help: An expert three-man horn section (Michael Cemprola, Jon Rees, and Paul Arbogast), a solid band (including Sufjan Stevens on banjo and vocals), and guest turns from Jens Lekman, Emil Nikolaisen of Serena-Maneesh, Chris Cohen of Cryptacize, and Mark Shippy of US Maple all bolster Smith's songs, adding a layer of muscle. But the band's ultimate function is to provide a taut and compelling counterpoint to Smith's pipes, which are as wild as ever: Here, the singing is the thing, and Smith's voice is stronger and more elastic than ever before. He's become a little less reliant on screeches and yelps, but his vocals are still riddled with idiosyncrasies, and the disparity between the singing and the instrumentation (which is tight and aggressive) keeps his songs consistently tense and interesting.
Some tracks belie a marked stylistic shift from alt-folk to full-on pysch-- like the spacey freakout "Hovering Above That Hill", which consists mostly of mesmeric guitar diddling, effects, and off-mic yelling. "This Day Is a Loaf" is more classic Danielson, a folksy, boisterous song about working ("Worry creeps in, like a thief from the nighttime," Smith sings, and artists everywhere commiserate). As wild as a Danielson record can get, his compositions are always meticulously recorded and arranged, and his work ethic is palpable on every track-- it's not that these songs feel over-labored, exactly (although they certainly don't seem spontaneous), it's that it's easy to hear all the ways in which Smith is consumed by his work.
But Danielson songs are still unabashedly joyful above all else-- Smith sniffed at irony before earnestness was cool again-- and that sense of deferential celebration is still what animates his work. "Can we be friends? Can't we be friends?" he implores (over bouncy-ball piano) on "Lil Norge", and resistance seems futile.
