The world rarely makes sense, but for some, music can offer a brief dose of clarity while illustrating the curious mechanics of the world around us. For the geography-bridging trio My Clever Android – consisting of singer-songwriter Kirk Ross, drummer/programmer Steven Wolf, and guitarist Jeff Thall – the distance between Vallejo, Los Angeles, and New York provides unique opportunities to collaborate across vast distance. The band creates a distinctive brew of gauzy dream pop, tenacious alt rock, and wired electronic wildness, a collage of influence and inspiration that’s as sonically eclectic as it is emotionally arresting.
Longtime friends, the three musicians separately worked through various studio sessions alongside artists such as Seal, Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith, Beyonce, Bryan Ferry, and David Bowie. They would first come together while recording a cover of Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released”, which played over the closing credits to Kirk’s brother Matt Ross’s film, Fantastic Cowboy. This collaboration flamed their communal musical affections and laid the foundation for My Clever Android. The end result of their work together being their debut album, MCA, which is due out in January.
The band brings a broad emotional wallop to the album’s tales of love, despair, disillusionment, and hope, constantly filtered through the dreams we cling to even as they fade from our memory and the oncoming sunrise. They suspend their audience in a perpetual dream state, a world of surreal circumstances and imagery where vast expanses of melodic experimentation lead further into the depths of our hearts and minds. And on a few tracks they’ve invited Kenya Hathaway, the daughter of Donny Hathaway, to provide a vocal center-point from which they can gather listless souls wandering aimlessly through this world.
For our first glimpse into the world of MCA, the band has shared “Elevator”, a propulsive rocker which builds up its infrastructure through electronic flourishes, slightly layered and altered vocals, and guitars that gleam in the shifting dynamic atmospheres. There’s something almost nostalgic in the way its approaches its modern rock foundations, capitalizing on the past while simultaneously searching for tracts of undiscovered sonic acreage. The vocals twist and entangle around the thumping rhythms that emerge from the band’s collective creativity, bound to no single purpose and rising in tandem with the music as it ascends upward, rather like its namesake.
Ross rather cryptically reveals: “I can no longer do this on my own and am humbly asking the elevator in the sky, the arbiter of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, for a lift.”
Listen to the song below.
MCA will be released on January 29 via Fuzzy Bannister Records. You can pre-order the album here. Follow the band on Facebook and Instagram.
