Over a handful of full-length releases, UK singer-songwriter Stephen Coates has established the template of the Real Tuesday Weld: a foggy concoction of cocktail-soaked big band, ragtime, lounge, bluegrass, and, improbably, electronic pop. This is typically dolloped with the archness of Stephin Merritt or Momus. Last time around, on The Return of the Clerkenwell Kid, the Weld's world also involved an alter ego, Clerkenwell's eponymous Kid. On The London Book of the Dead, all of Coates' typical foibles remain in place, but the alter ego has been replaced by a sort of Tibetan Book of the Dead for London. Um, as implied by the album title.
Borrowing the Bardo Thodol's soul-passing-through-life narrative arc was probably helpful in organizing the album, but it chokes the songs a bit, making for some overly concept-driven experiences that, again, remain all too familiar. Still, the Real Tuesday Weld's ambitious, anachronistic whimsy is an all too rare commodity in pop, particularly because Coates never deigns to remove the yawning distance between singer and narrator. Where the ideas don't always pay off, the strikingly old-fashioned arrangements and the production and songwriting updating them still make for some unusual and rewarding juxtapositions.
"I wrote this song long before the war," Coates croons on "It's a Wonderful Li(f)e", and of course he could mean any conflict from World War II to the current situation in Iraq. The track is a highlight of The London Book of the Dead, summing up its contradictions. Its slow, swinging horn samples and bright piano set up a tale that obviously isn't Frank Capra. Constantly invoking the title pun, Coates' mordancy cuts through: "I'll say you're beautiful, when you're not beautiful." Oh but my mom says I gots inner beauty.
The basic conceit of the album means it begins, more or less, with birth and ends, more or less, with death. "Life is good when you're feeling love" and "when you're filled with blood" both, Coates sings through oily-water effects on opener "Blood Sugar Love", with its dinky electronics, bassoon, and arpeggios. The tune is unnecessarily reprised at the end of funereal waltz "Bringing the Body Back Home", which has more horns, bells, and stately drum rolls, about someone who's "reached the end of your love"-- but "love was the one thing worth living for," we're told, as UFO synths, bluegrass fiddle, and jazzy piano make it hard to tell which part's ironic. Andrews Sisters-style female harmonies wrap up too-brief closer "Apart".
Less concept-heavy songs are mostly light and amusing fare: the cynical, debonair Cole Porter parody "Kix", the completely 21st century (except for its writerly subject) lap-pop with acoustic guitar of "Dorothy Parker", or the dreary "I Love London", which could've been one of Paul McCartney's Tin Pan Alley nods if not for its anti-romanticism and lyrics about crack dealers. The scat-driven "Cloud Cuckooland", which sounds like little more than a revamp of the Real Tuesday Weld's highly memorable 2004 video selection "Bathtime in Clerkenwell", is more trying, though, as are a few stifling instrumental or nearly instrumental interludes. It's on jaunty "I Believe", however, that Coates sums himself up best: "Yeah, I believe in people who I believe believe in love." There's a fine album here, but it's a few degrees of separation removed.
