During the day, Dave Cloud read books to the visually impaired for the Nashville Talking Library. At night, however, he preached the gospel of rock'n'roll at small venues around town, with his crack-backing band the Gospel of Power in tow. Singing in a low, grainy voice that sounds like Captain Beefheart, Cloud played garage rock and noise as though the Sonics and Sonic Youth were the same band, adding drone and distortion to his three-minute rave-ups and pop tunes. His guitar usually sported only one string, two if he was feeling adventurous, and onstage he transmogrified into the raging id to Nashville's massive ego: the wild, demented offspring chained in the basement, never spoken of in polite company.
Cloud's handful of records comprise a modest catalog that barely sold in the U.S. but established him as something of a hero in Scandinavia. There is a strong you had to be there, man aspect to artists like Cloud, whose charisma is most intense onstage and yet whose live shows don't always translate to YouTube clips or vinyl. And yet, even without the secondhand stories of onstage shenanigans, there is a great deal to admire in his brand of grouty garage rock, from his rusted-tailpipe vocals to the Gospel of Power's grimy reimaginings of '60s pop riffs and grooves.
Today Is the Day That They Take Me Away surveys the breadth of Cloud's relatively brief recording career. He may have started performing at local record stores back in the '70s and his previous band the Psychotic Night Auditors may have been banned for life from the Springwater, but he finally released his debut album in 1999, followed by three more studio albums, one compilation, and a live album recorded just down I-40 at GonerFest in Memphis. Rather than mapping out the development of his sound over 16 tracks (27 on the digital version), Today Is the Day instead reveals an artist who had already refined his aesthetic and had utmost confidence in its viability over the years. In fact, he makes that small patch of garage rock sound unreasonably large: "Party Doll" sounds like Buddy Holly back from the dead, playing guitar until his hands literally fall off, while the title track layers his paranoid ramblings into a kind of incantatory warning that picks up where Napoleon XIV left off.
We've heard songs like "Bimbo" and "400 Girls" before, reiterations of omnivorous male sexuality that innervated early rock'n'roll but soon became a tired ritual, a means of oppression rather than liberation. But there's something so exaggerated in Cloud's delivery that the songs sound like parodies: hetero-dude desire exploded to Tex Avery proportions. Cloud sings so often about unattainable women that romantic longing becomes the de facto theme of this collection, undermining the jokiness of "Thieving Love Bandit" and "Damn Damn Damn Damn" and suggesting a very real sense of loneliness motivating these songs.
Today Is the Day That They Take Me Away is an epitaph for an unusual career, because Dave Cloud died earlier this year, age 58, of melanoma. He never achieved the fame and fortune many believed was his due, but his true destiny was to be Nashville's glorious cult icon. He obviously relished the role, and this affectionate tribute reveals an artist who managed—amazingly enough—to remake rock'n'roll in his own image.
