Pablo Clements & James Griffith, (Toydrum, UNKLE), and Gavin Clark (UNKLE, Clayhill, Sunhouse) present THE EVANGELIST.
Is it at all possible that people could stop dying? I hope it doesn’t sound too glib but if you are thinking of dying soon please get touch with us and we’ll go for a pint or have a cup of tea in the garden centre cafe. We need people to stay alive better.
Horribly this is the posthumous release from the late former Clayhill singer Gavin Clark along with UNKLE folks Pablo Clements and James Griffith (aka Toytown). Over the eleven tracks here they produce the kind of grandiose but murky danceable pop that Noel Gallagher always threatened to make before pulling out of potentially interesting collaborations with the likes of the Amorphous Androgynous. ‘Spirit’ for example is soulful and pleading, ‘Same Hands’ bounces along with a glammy stomp.
Most of the music here was written with Shane Meadows 'This Is England 1990' in mind and certainly there’s a cinematic intensity to the gloomy ‘Im In Love Tonight’ but for every ballad there’s a pulsating thumper such as 'Know One Will Ever Know' which has a Chemical Brothers intensity and a keening pleading chorus that is both widescreen and affecting. Excellent stuff. Some of the more acoustic stuff veers into more Verve territory but it's some of the dance pop tracks that excel. ‘I Wanna Lift You Up’ is in particular impressive and kind of sounds like 70’s glam re-badged for the post rave generation.
It’s a terrible shame though that one of the makers of this confident and potentially influential collection didn’t live to see it’s completion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Clark
