Future Pilot AKA is Sushil K. Dade, the former bassist for the early 90s alternative rock band the Soup Dragons, so it isn't surprising in the least that he would want to distance himself from his past. Remarkably, he's done a pretty good job of it with this project. 1999's A Galaxy of Sound featured an inspired crew of collaborators, including the Pastels, the Red Krayola, Bill Wells, and Kim Fowley, among others. But the new record, Tiny Waves, Mighty Sea, is less of an intercontinental flight than Future Pilot's maiden voyage.
Tiny Waves shares its predecessor's collaborate-or-die inclination, but this time, Dade invites musicians closer to his Scottish home. This means I miss a second chance to hear him mixing it up with Suicide's Alan Vega and Andy Weatherall of Two Lone Swordsmen. And I really miss not hearing another Dade composition featuring ex-Fall girl Brix Smith. In these artists' stead, Dade has corralled members of Belle and Sebastian, the Pastels (again), Superstar, the Delgados, Teenage Fanclub, and, erm, James. For three days, Dade frolicked around with the Scottish indie elite, resulting in a soothing pastoral album that more than whiffs of positive love vibes and patchouli. George Harrison would have loved it.
Like A Galaxy of Sound, Tiny Waves, Mighty Sea doesn't conceal Dade's Indian heritage. But unlike members of the Anglo-Asian underground, Dade doesn't drop in clanging signifiers such as sputtering tabla runs, sitar jams, or acrobatic vocal melismatics. In fact, Belle and Sebastian's Stuart Murdoch sings the album's most overtly Indian song, "Om Namah Shivaya." Dade thereby neatly sidesteps stereotype and at the same time fully expresses the nationless, raceless universality of the mantra that literally means, "I bow to Shiva," Shiva being the supreme reality of your inner self. Perhaps some purists will criticize Dade for relocating Indian devotional music in such an unorthodox setting, but to me, Dade's musical accompaniment to this ten-minute swelling and receding acoustic waltz reinforces his insistence of the universality of the chant.
Tiny Waves, Mighty Sea doesn't open with such grand intentions. "Maid of the Loch" is a dreamy, slightly familiar instrumental that introduces the tranquil musical themes Dade expands upon over the album's thirteen tracks. Amidst glockenspiel chimes and background vocals from the Pastels' Katrina Mitchell, Isobel Campbell lends her indie-baby whisper to the almost nursery rhyme-like traditional hymn "Ananda Is the Ocean." Superstar's Joe McAlinden and Jim McColloch harmonize with each other during the roiling cover of Jim Pepper's Native American-influenced jazz-pop crossover hit "Witchi Tai To." And after another traditional ballad, "Darshan," Julia Smith sings "Beautiful Dreamer."
96-year-old Julia Smith met Dade while he was working for Alzheimer's Scotland. Written by nineteenth-century balladeer Stephen Foster, "Beautiful Dreamer" is less known than Foster's most famous songs, "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair," "Swanee River," and "Camptown Races." Smith's performance is, of course, fragile. But as she sings, you can hear the rush of a youthful past fondly remembered. It's as moving a performance as "Voices of Old People," the dialog-collage Simon and Garfunkel included on Bookends.
For the devotional "Shree Ram, Jai Ram," Dade wraps the chanted vocals of his wife, Vinita, in glockenspiel tinkles, ground bass notes, and Ralph MacDonald's jittering saxophone. Stephen Pastel contributes a tremolo guitar and electronic treatments to the lullaby "Opel Waters." Norman Blake steps up to the vocal mike for "Beat of a Drum," which is, predictably, the most poppy and upbeat track here. Lyrically, "Beat of a Drum" is nothing spectacular, a message song about the healing properties of music. Dade needn't resort to the hamfisted language of pop psychology to make his point. The other tracks on this album far more powerfully convey Dade's message than the lyrics Blake gamely and obligingly sings.
After Stuart Murdoch's meditative highlight, Tiny Waves, Mighty Sea returns to Earth with MacDonald's tenor sax crying a Coltrane blues amid multiple reverbed guitars and Bill Wells' Wurlitizer. Once the feedback screeches have faded, the album closes, in appropriate blissfulness, with Vinita Dade's unaccompanied "Prayer for Ananda."
Just as A Galaxy of Sound showcased Dade's experimental side, Tiny Waves, Mighty Sea bountifully displays Dade's tenderness and spirituality. A fusion of these two sides of Dade's artistry would make for an album greater than the sum of its parts, and far hipper than the cred of Dade's collaborators. For now, Tiny Waves, Mighty Sea will tide me over well enough.
