New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Daniel Land's first album - Love Songs For The Chemical Generation - was called "One of the finest records of its time" by Drowned In Sound, and "Like Slowdive reimagined by Phil Spector" by the NME. It is now widely considered to be a classic of the shoegaze genre, although
Daniel remains, in the words of The Skinny, a "Dream-Pop Cult Hero", known only to the shoegaze cognoscenti.
That might be set to change with the release of Daniel's new album, Out of Season, his third as a solo artist, and fifth overall, and undoubtedly his most ambitious record to date.
Out of Season is a series of reflections on history, memory, and post-Brexit Britain, which was inspired by Daniel's return to the landscapes of his youth - the rugged, underpopulated west coast of Somerset, where he has spent increasing amounts of time since beginning the album in 2019. Out of Season was written and partly recorded there, in a static caravan overlooking the coast, during the period when the UK was tearing itself apart over its relationship to Europe.
"I didn't set out to write about Brexit",
Daniel says, "I have a kind of horror of political music. But I couldn't escape the atmosphere of the time - this strange, distorted version of 'Englishness' in the national psyche. I've always been interested in memory and nostalgia; Brexit illustrates the dangers of taking seductive, possibly false memories at face value".
Songs like "
White Chalk", "Island of Ghosts", and the album's title track, represent a series of attempts to reclaim an older, more peculiar idea of England which,
Daniel says has been "Lost in the nationalist mythmaking of the past decades" - the island of misfits and outsiders exemplified by the works of Derek Jarman, for example, whom
Daniel was rediscovering while working on the album.
"I must have read
Modern Nature ten times",
Daniel says. "What I love about Jarman is that he had a deep, abiding love for England, but it was a very complicated, critical and a very queer kind of love. That was very much my mood, going into the making of this album".
Like Jarman's work, Out of Season probes questions of national identity whilst also displaying resolutely queer themes throughout. Daniel's voice - once described by The Guardian as "The spawn of
Elizabeth Fraser and Anthony Hegarty" - is less heavily-reverbed than before, bringing to the fore his often-confessional lyrics, inspired by the frankness of modern queer poets like Andrew McMillan, Seán Hewitt, and Ocean Vuong. In a genre often maligned for its lack of engagement with the real world,
Daniel uses the sonic conventions of shoegaze as a backdrop for a distinctly outward-looking exploration of memory, identity, and desire.
A lyrical highlight is the gorgeous "Southern Soul", a deceptively straightforward recounting of a decades-old hookup with a closeted guy from his hometown which,
Daniel says, "Serves as a metaphor for everything I'm talking about in the album". Elsewhere the potentially Slowdive-referencing opening track "Alison" subtly flips assumptions with Daniel's note that "Alison is a fairly common boy's name in Lusophone countries, like Portugal and Brazil". And in keeping with an album imbued with references to the heroes of gay literature, Daniel's self-styling of the record as a "Dream Pop Album on
National Themes" deliberately references the full title of Tony Kushner's era-defining play Angels in America, whose central character is namechecked in the hook-laden "Lemon Boy" - a song which must surely stand as Daniel's most deliciously pop moment yet.
In recent years
Daniel has become both a scholar and a practitioner of the kind of music he creates, studying towards a PhD on artists like the Cocteau
Twins at the London College of Music, while collaborating with artists like Darkher and Siobhan De Mare. He is currently writing a memoir about homophobia.
Lauded by Mark Radcliffe, Guy Garvey, Tom Robinson, and many others, he makes the kind of music that, in the words of BBC
Radio 1's Rob Da Bank, "The late John Peel would have loved".
This is an album about history, nostalgia, and the fallibility of memory. I started it in London, and put it together in a temporary studio in a holiday home on the Somerset coast, at a time when the UK was tearing itself apart over its relationship to Europe.
This is not a political album, and I didn't set out to write directly about the Brexit debate, but the atmosphere of the time was pervasive - in particular, the exaggerated and distorted idea of "Englishness", deep in the national psyche (what the writer John Harris calls "a set of terms and contradictions about our past"), which seemed to illustrate the dangers of nostalgia, or of taking seductive - and possibly false - memories at face value.
Since my last album, The
Dream of the Red Sails, I have become increasingly interested in the workings and distortions of memory. Recent neuroscience on the subject has shown that the biological process involved in memory retrieval actually destroys the "original", and replaces it with an inexact "copy". Images of our past, therefore, are imperfect - photocopies of photocopies of photocopies - which explains both the divergence of shared memories over time, and their tendency to exaggeration and falsification. It might also explain why grainy, degraded Super 8 footage has become a convenient shorthand for memories or flashbacks in films.
It seems pretty clear to me that something similar has been happening in the nationalist myth-making of the last decade or so; in some ways, this album represents a series of attempts to reclaim an older, more peculiar idea of England, which seemed to have been lost - the island of misfits and outsiders exemplified by the films and writings of Derek Jarman, for example, who I was rediscovering at the time I was working on the album. Jarman had a deep, abiding love for England, but it was a very complicated, constructively critical and, yes, a queer kind of love - very much my mood going into the making of this album.
I wrote the lyrics for "
White Chalk" on a flight home from Europe, shortly after the UK left the European Union, and an image from that time remains clear: Southern England from the air, frail and isolated, the way it may have looked during the
Battle of Britain. This is, of course, an image laden with history, and metaphor; at the time I was reading the essays of
Fintan O'Toole and
David Olusoga, which helped me to see that Britain never really recovered from the Second World War (or from its concomitant loss of empire); it remains imprisoned in the mental cartography of the 1940s.
Listening to the album now, many months after I finished it, I remember these thoughts chasing themselves around my head while I was mixing the album.
At the time, I was on my own nostalgia trip - returning as an adult to the beloved landscapes of my adolescence - and I would take long walks to clear the music out of my head.
It was early October, out of season, and the wild, grey autumn seas battered the Somerset coastline. Then, as now, I didn't have any answers to the questions I was posing, but questions of identity spoke less to me than the permanence of the landscapes, and the eternal verities of sea, sky, and land.
That is the image that, for me, remains from the making of this album - scenes beautifully captured in the paintings of Katy Barrell (my high school art teacher) whose semi-abstract landscapes grace this album's cover.
Daniel Land
Summer 2023
A magnificent, magical and monolithic slice of shoegaze beauty.
Sounds like Slowdive reimagined by Phil Spector.- NME
Completely out of fashion with the popular music of today, bearing no relation to anything else being made. And I love it to pieces. - THE LINE OF BEST FIT
His voice soars, like the spawn of Liz Fraser and Antony Hegarty in space. This is the sort of thing
Daniel Land & the
Modern Painters make you write. They should feel deeply ashamed. - THE GUARDIAN
A dazzling array of atmospheric, mesmerising excursions, serves up a whole range of twists and turns with every subsequent listen. - DROWNED IN SOUND
It's great, is that. Proper shoegaze. We love that. - TOP40-CHARTS
The sort of stripped down, laid back sound employed by bands like Mojave 3, but with the gauzey textures of the Cocteau Twins. - TOM ROBINSON, BBC RADIO 6
You can't help but think this is the kind of thing the late John Peel would have loved. - ROB DA BANK, BBC RADIO 1
Like
Spiritualized with added goosebumps, or My Bloody
Valentine given a bucolic country-pop makeover. Expect these gorgeous shoegaze anthems to quietly sneak up on you and steal your heart. - CITY LIFE
Without doubt, one of the city's most underrated songwriters. - DROWNED IN MANCHESTER
Be it the magnificently climbing lines of melodic lead guitar that bring every track to some sort of shamanic ecstasy, or the subtle, effects laden cloud of sound that he creates by vibrating the guitar... when you see someone who has such an understanding of the sonic depths of what the instrument is truly capable of, it's a rare and wondrous thing. - MANCHESTER MUSIC
Like
Elbow taken even more widescreen. It channels the Cocteau Twins, but more than anything, it sounds like
Scarlett Johansson's album, which makes sense since
Scarlett sings like a boy and
Daniel sings like a girl. - NME
https://www.danielland.co.uk
