What if James Lavelle made a good album and nobody cared? That was the question at hand for Where Did the Night Fall, last year's fourth LP from Lavelle's still-going, mostly forgotten UNKLE project. The record, which saw Lavelle swapping beats for psych-rock textures and a correspondingly fitting list of guests (the Black Angels, Autolux, Sleepy Sun), had its share of mostly highlights. Not that anyone heard them; after all, this is a project that hit the ground limping with 1998's debut, Psyence Fiction-- a record remembered mostly for the violent Jonathan Glazer-directed video for the Thom Yorke-guesting cut "Rabbit in Your Headlights". The resulting decade and change hasn't been especially kind to UNKLE, so the relative vitality of Where Did the Night Fall was a nice treat and a surprising turn in Lavelle's inexplicably lasting career.
Of course, Where Did the Night Fall is an UNKLE album, so it ultimately falls prone to bloat and murky atmospherics. Ideally, rounding up the LP's highlights would have made for a very good EP-- a "shorter is better" argument that's given weight on UNKLE's latest release, Only the Lonely. It could be assumed that this particular EP rounds up leftovers from the last album (both do share the same metallic-looking, female-fetishizing type of [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| cover art), but it's easier to think of it as a companion piece. Partially because the EP and LP are seeing release as part of a special edition set; also, you don't dare get Nick Cave to sing on a track and call it a "leftover." Cave opens the EP with the spectacularly sleazy "Money and Run", which finds him howling Big Beat truisms over bashed-out drums and scum-filtered guitar. Cave is the biggest name on this bill, and he's certainly treated as such by being given the best song, but the other guests are given suitable backing material as well: the Duke Spirit's Liela Moss shakes off the JAMC-worshipping demons of her main act and gets gothy on "The Dog Is Black", while vocalist Gavin Clark gives "Wash the Love Away" a lost-in-a-K-hole anthemic feel.
So Only the Lonely, like its companion, is a success of sorts; that said, Lavelle is still the one running the show, and his history of unwitting self-sabotage (see: Mike D's embarrassing verse on Psyence Fiction's "The Knock (Drums of Death Pt. 2)") continues here. The main issue is that the production applied to these tracks sounds absolutely torpid-- like a suffocating, slimy fog that dilutes the songs' more visceral elements or, in the case of "The Dog Is Black", makes the music sound muddled, dated. What could be a collection of bombastic, electro-tinged psych songs still somehow feels stranded in the 1990s-- and, yet, for the first time in, well, forever, the future is looking brighter for UNKLE. Keep your fingers crossed that Lavelle doesn't blow it-- but if he does, at least try to act surprised.
