Steven Coates must spend a lot of time swimming through the currents of his unconscious. A few years ago, Coates awoke from a dream certain he had been 1930s jazz dandy Al Bowlly and 60s cult actress Tuesday Weld in the nocturnal presence; that day he adopted a new name, sidetracked a career in the visual arts, and began to make modern music that drew inspiration from classic European cabaret and throwback romanticism. With I, Lucifer, Coates, under nom-de-chanson (The Real) Tuesday Weld, draws the listener deep into a scratchy, sepia-toned fantasy that first suggests the gap between boozy, swinging ragtime, sophisticated lounge poetics, and innovative beat technique, then bridges it in one swooning swoop.
Besides its musical dexterity and pastiche of divergent styles, I, Lucifer is interesting for the fact that it's the soundtrack to English author Glenn Duncan's novel of the same name. The story is the devil's first-person account of his attempt at redemption by spending a month in the all-too-human body of down-and-out author Declan Gunn (hello, anagram?) without committing grievous sin. Though clearly the CD and the book don't match up song by page, they both evoke the same wry British humor and sense of inevitable, tragic love, making for a unique intellectual experience that gets through to the heart via the head. It's a pretty grandiose prospect that surprisingly never settles into self-conscious preciousness or pseudo-scholarly pomp, revealing instead a consistently alluring narrative vision.
Writing and producing I, Lucifer's self-styled "antique beat" variety act, Coates also enlists some interesting secondary players, such as veteran British musical comedian Earl Okin on "Bathtime in Clerkenwell". "Bathtime", the album's most sweeping, memorable number-- something like a breakbeat "Belleville Rendezvous"-- layers Okin's rustic, gonzo scat over a manic rimshot and cymbal rhythm, and slips bright, swelling brass under Aphex Twin effects in an era-twisting Gramophones-to-headphones mashup. This song gives Coates' introduction to the surreal, intriguing dream world of (The Real) Tuesday Weld, and it's an improbable stunner.
Coates' vocal delivery is of the subdued, Gainsbourgian variety-- he hardly sings, instead relying on his whispery, melodic cadence and a natural, naked delivery on songs like "(Still) Terminally Ambivalent Over You" and "The Ugly and the Beautiful", which exemplifies I, Lucifer's lyrical sensibility: "The drugs just ain't enough/ Though I like the way they made us crazy/ But love's the only drug/ That turns the ugly into the beautiful." Bolstering the vocal element, the Tiger Lilies' Martyn Jacques lends his crisp, quivering croon to the bittersweet "Someday (Never)" and French singer/guitarist David Guez fills the Gallic quotient with the tender acoustic ballad "La Bete Et La Belle".
With the help of Scottish alt-jazz chanteuse Pinkie McClure, Coates moves from ethereal anxiety on the Badalamenti-esque "One More Chance" to his own slick, RZA-darkened Brit-hop rap on "The Life and Times of the Clerkenwell Kid". "The Eternal Seduction of Eve", meanwhile, falls somewhere between a buoyant hip-hop bump and Air's vast spaces, with Coates lamenting like a lovelorn Joe Frank, "From the Brooklyn Bridge to St. Petersburg/ And every boardroom or boudoir across the world/ From the fall of Rome to the Renaissance/ Through reformation, Cold War, Vietnam/ I'm waiting for you to notice me."
Like any superior story, the variety of moods and settings I, Lucifer spans is inspiring. Coates not only has the grand imagination and facile wit necessary to build an evocative fictional world, but he's got the musical prowess to keep the plot moving forward without leaving the listener behind. An album worth reading.
